Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month
Details
- External ID
- 46932483
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Feb. 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 12
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5970350404312669
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
After analyzing 9 years of HN side project posts, I found some counter-intuitive patterns about what makes projects profitable.Three things that stood out:1. B2B dominates: 73% of $500+/month projects target businesses, not consumers2. Speed matters more than polish: Average 47 days from launch to first sale. Most started charging with 3-5 core features.3. Pricing cluster: 87% price between $20-49. Low enough for impulse purchase, high enough to be sustainable.I compiled this into a dataset of nearly 700 projects with tech stack, pricing, and timeline data. Built it because I was planning my own side project and wanted to see patterns, not just success stories.Available at [https://haileyzhou.gumroad.com/l/pknktt] ($49) as html report and raw .csv data.Data source note: All from public HN posts 2017-2025. I did the cleaning, categorization, and cross-referencing.Happy to discuss methodology or findings. Curious what patterns others see or if this matches your experience?
Enrichment
- Theme
- startup launch and fundraising tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- analysis of side projects that reached $500/month revenue
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is a content/blog post analyzing publicly available Hacker News post history, which can easily be scraped, aggregated with an LLM script, and published as an article.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Unclear if product achieves claimed sales figures for side projects
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 130 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #50 of 131 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 89 days after the earliest competitor.
- I measured the half-life of 41,301 Show HN launches. It's 7 hours · hn · 2026-07-02 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I made a simulator for personal finance (5 year update) · hn · 2026-05-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A weekend project to visualize your HN usage in 2025 · hn · 2026-01-01 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- 20 years of Hacker News discussions, clustered and visualized · hn · 2026-03-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app · hn · 2026-02-24 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- A $20/year invoicing tool for solo developers (simple, fast, no bloat) · hn · 2025-12-03 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Show HN submissions have tripled since 2023 · hn · 2026-01-11 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TierWise · hn · 2026-01-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.