I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr).
Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.
A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.
Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) is a private journal that can be done all through email. It emails you daily, you reply. As you build up entries it will start sending you past entries in the daily emails.
Some of the better use cases include:
* Keeping a developer journal (I see a few others here are working on something along those lines as well)
* New parenting journal
* Daily journaling
The open source option you mention is at https://dabble.me and has a free hosted option as well. I open sourced the project in hopes that devs would contribute as I was a big OhLife user myself, but instead we all just started competing.
I've also reached out to the OhLife guys about 1) open sourcing their code, and 2) letting their users know alternatives exist. After a pretty late reply, all I got back was a 1 liner saying they weren't interested.
Sidetrack: Does your 17yo daughter really want to have her journal on a service her dad runs?
You might check out VidCast at http://dabble.me - it has a bookmarklet compatible with Twit.tv making your experience with finding a video on Twit.tv & casting it to your TV a bit more streamlined.
Since Plex transcodes to Chromecast friendly format, this bookmarklet will only cast if your original files are already in MP4, OGG, or WEBM format. So, don't expect your AVI files to cast with the bookmarklet.
Plex is awesome, though, and they deserve that $5/mo for making the Chromecast actually useable.
Good question. I'm not doing anything special other than grabbing the MP4 and sending it to Chromecast, so I assume it's #3. As far as login permissions, I haven't run into any with my brief testing. I would assume since I'm grabbing the MP4 file directly (and sometimes even with the temporary timestamp to allow access to the file) it's not going to be much of an issue. Google put out a LOT of sample code to make this relatively easy to implement. Honestly, coming up with the REGEX that worked across as many sites as possible was the hardest part.
Hey all - something I put together last night after hearing the news of Google opening up the dev tools.
You can visit, for example, a TED talk, hit the bookmarklet and it will pull down the MP4 behind the scenes and present it on a layer that's now Chromecast friendly. Same goes for Vimeo, Plex.tv (without having to pay the $5/mo) and quite a few other video sites that are most likely against the TOS to link to.
Definitely open to hearing the thoughts of the community!
The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happ...
Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.
A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.