Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month
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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?
HN · launched Feb 8, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 40%) · 0 views
Niche: saas pricing and financial analytics tools · 51 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
More like this: all 51 launches in saas pricing and financial analytics tools →
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 : 222 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #82 of 223 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 89 days after the earliest competitor.
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