Making $1M from my personal projects | Hacker News Reader

Making $1M from my personal projects

alexwest.co

The only way to make money from personal projects is to sell a book/course teaching people how to make money from personal projects.

This doesn't appear to be about a book for sale? It's just this old blog post formatted in various ebook formats for download. (And, I guess, with future plans to do the same for other blog posts in their archive.)

Point still stands. They have made ~$0 from personal projects and are now trying to monetize their "journey" with a clickbait title and an ebook.

Oh, the "$1M" title is obviously totally detached from the contents of the post (I mean, I assume it is totally detached from the contents, it's not like this was even worth skimming through). Given it covers 2018-2020, I wouldn't want to say for certain they didn't make $1M in aggregate over the next 5 years though.

But no, I don't think the point stands, because they are not selling an ebook or anything else. The pattern you identified exists, but I don't think this matches the pattern.

That's not true at all.

I put an early GenAI side project up, someone convinced me to monetize, and boom - $700k ARR in almost no time.

I'm not sure it's possible now with so little effort given how full the space is, but if you're in the right time and place with the right solution, there are tons of people that will pay you.

Same story as always: create value, solve a problem, make something people want.

Willing to name the service?

> $700k ARR

Projected, or has it been operating for a year?

You have 2000+ recurring paying customers using your fakeyou website?

Yeah! It held at that revenue for over a year, but that was several years ago. Then the market filled out. I stopped working on it (and listening to customers) to pursue other things.

I'm about to open source our desktop AI VFX compositing and animation tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://getartcraft.com/ (github and download links are not live yet)

I'm an engineer and a filmmaker. I'm really into video generation, but controllability and consistency are critical. I've been working on staging, blocking, and animation tools to control how various commercial and open source models behave.

I just didn't have a passion for TTS and voice conversion.

The Uberduck folks were my closest competitors for a while and they were YC funded. I think Suno and Udio sunk their product roadmap for music tools and they pivoted to something else. Maybe voice agents? They're cool folks.

Now Weights.gg is leading the "TTS for teens / consumers" space. There are dozens of startups in the voice conversion for music production space. This used to be an easy ramp to revenue, but the market is saturated.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

One ought not underestimate the cumulative effects of time. Multiple long-running projects with modest income can be surprisingly lucrative.

Not true. There are stories. Sublime Text is one of them. I am sure author of that project made good chunk of money. It used to be the most popular text editor for a while (based on StackOverlow).

I personally have another example. Own MM B2B.

There are also stories of people starting trillion dollar businesses from their garage. Yes you can technically do that. The chances of you actually doing it are ~0.

I believe the OP was talking about the personal projects. Not startups or people who want to make a trillion dollar businesses. I believe there is different mentality behind those.

I feel like I'm being mocked for having a widescreen monitor.

I'm on phone and it is also pretty unpleasant to read.

Scroll scroll scroll yeah fuck this

nah, just rotate your monitor 90 degrees (or 270).

It's just really bad CSS. On smaller screens, the container has a max-width of 540px and a left- and right-margin of 15% each lol. So we get to enjoy our 22px monospace Inconsolata within 378px of horizontal space.

document.querySelector(".my-auto").setAttribute("style", "text-align: left;");

I'm actually having fun reading it after applying that.

Daring fireball is almost as bad.

It's a CSS bug since the column gets narrower the wider your screen gets lol. The culprit is the 15% padding in the inline style applied to this div:

   <div class="container my-auto" style="color: white; padding-left: 15%; padding-right: 15%; text-align: left;">

Obviously you’re supposed to pivot it to portrait orientation.

"alexwest.com" more like "alexsouth.com"

This comment lead to what I believe is my first laugh-out-loud reaction to maximizing a window.

My guy, tell your model to not spew emojis everywhere it's unbearable.

Indeed. The whole "post" is so cringe-inducing it is unbearable.

what the fuck is this formatting lol

TL;DR he made A LOT of products, most which failed, then succeeded with https://cyberleads.com/

At least that's what I'm getting from the blog.

I couldn't even skim it and get a tldr, my brain just 'nopes'

Cool on making $1M though, I'm guessing through selling books

Considering most people with work and kids don't have extensive free time, wouldn't it be more practical if lengthy information was frequently condensed into accessible 1-2 page summaries?

Summary of Alex West - Book One: Year 1

In his first year after finishing A-levels (at age 18), Alex West felt lost and unenthusiastic about the traditional university path. A pivotal moment came when he read "Rich Dad Poor Dad," which ignited his desire for financial independence and entrepreneurship.

He began his entrepreneurial journey with eBay arbitrage.

Initially, he sold personal belongings. He then discovered the concept of buying items cheaply and reselling them for a profit. His first successful arbitrage venture involved PS3 controllers, buying them in bulk or from less optimized listings and reselling them individually. This process taught him the fundamentals of e-commerce: sourcing products, creating listings, photography, packaging, shipping, customer service, and dealing with issues like returns and scams. He reinvested his profits, expanding his product range to include items like GoPro accessories. By the end of this first year, he had managed to make approximately £10,000 in profit. Key takeaways from Year 1 for Alex were the importance of taking action, learning by doing, gaining practical business skills (even on a small scale), and the empowering realization that he could forge his own path outside of conventional routes. This foundational year built his confidence and provided him with tangible business experience.

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