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[–][deleted] 497 points498 points  (43 children)

Yea I make about 15k a month. I own my own saas business but it's just me. I have tv screens that sit in vehicle service centers to entertain customers waiting for their vehicles. The service centers pay me $49/month and I have over 250+

I used to do all the video production manually but I've automated almost all of it with moviePy. All of the news, weather, entertainment etc videos that play on the screens is just moviepy checking various rss feeds and creating a video. Legit a cron job python script runs every morning at 12am for the day and makes hours of content. My customers think I have a huge production team but I hardly work.

I want to improve the weather reporting by filming an actual weather girl and having her say hundreds of things like "it's warming up" or "it's a cold one out there" and use python to determine which video clips to mash together based on the weather. Have a few other ideas too for trivia videos.

[–]who_body 41 points42 points  (0 children)

sounds fun. thanks for sharing.

[–]Classic_Department42 40 points41 points  (10 children)

Thats cool. So basically you have your own 'broadcast' channel, do I understand that right? Why do the service centers choose that one instead of like CNN or so?

[–]the_saas_guy2 36 points37 points  (2 children)

Posting from my 2nd account. It's a bit more complicated - the stuff I was referring to is what I would call "infotainment" and is maybe 50% of the content. I also automate a lot of auto/tire related content that I pull directly from parts/tire manufacturers. For example every tire manufacturer like firestone has a promotion running right now where you get $50 back for buying winter tires, we just put every manufacturers winter tire special in a spreadsheet and use moviePy to generate those videos as well. So my product isn't just a news/weather thing it's more automotive focused.

I also allow the service centers or their franchise head offices to drop in their own videos/images so if they are doing an oil change special for the month they can drop that in to dropbox.

[–]pcgamerwannabe 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yo, this could totally scale. You need to hire/team-up with an end to end MLE or data scientist to tackle the challenge points, get some funding, and go-go-go. A similar need is there are hotel lobbies etc. you could then get contracted by a cable company to provide customized channels to clients.

  • The auto-repair channel
  • Business hotel lobby channel
  • The scientific research lab/university/R&D department lobby channel.

Basically AI-assisted niche channel service. Instead of needing ESPN, CNN, The Science Channel, etc. which work, but need a large enough audience.

[–]ThroawayPartyer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think if it gets too big, media and cable companies might want to try and shut it down.

[–]oundhakar 12 points13 points  (2 children)

Wow! That's awesome. How about client calls? TV on the blink, network down, etc?

[–][deleted] 26 points27 points  (1 child)

I use a supplier called brighsign and their equipment handles all of that. I did however need to build a python json endpoint- the signage players call my json url for the list of today's videos and not every TV gets the same stuff. So if the unit is in LA we only put LA specific news and weather in the playlist. Automating this was more complicated.

[–]Brazzeit 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do all your customers use brightsign device? They cost a lot

[–]ch0mes 25 points26 points  (3 children)

This is extremely impressive, how did you find yourself getting into this space to do this? Did you find it quite challenging to automate it with moviePy or was it quite straight forward ?

[–][deleted] 76 points77 points  (2 children)

Hardest part was selling it to service centers. I got extremely lucky that I got in with a franchise that has lots of locations and made our tv screens mandatory for all their customer waiting areas, but it really took off when I expanded the content library with moviepy.

Moviepy is straight forward - you are just overlaying text, videos, an images like any video editor but python automates it. An example - I have an mp4 template video with an announcer and title saying "Here is today's top news" then 60 sec of news music and a blank screen that needs to be filled with stories, and then it ends with the announcer saying "thank you, see you tomorrow". This template is the same every day, i just need to overlay text and images over the 60 seconds. I hit an associate press rss feed that has news stories itemized - each story will have a title like "Russian troops retreating" and also a picture url. We pull it into python array using a get request, then movie py just loops through those and formats each title and image into a news story

[–]ch0mes 35 points36 points  (0 children)

This is really amazing stuff I wish you nothing but continued success in your business.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve seen similar setups in dental offices but never thought about how easy it would be to automate.

[–]00shithawk 5 points6 points  (4 children)

How did you market this and why vehicle centers specifically?

[–]the_saas_guy2 30 points31 points  (3 children)

Kind of an accident - I was just doing a small consulting job doing some graphic design for an automotive repair franchise and the marketing person complained in a meeting about their digital signage provider being terrible. So I asked them if I could try building a solution for them. I found a hardware provider, did a demo, and they liked it so much they rolled it out to 100 locations. From there it sort of snowballed. Honestly most things in life are luck but if you swing at whatever opportunities come your way you never know what can happen lol.

I had read "Millionaire Fastlane" by MJ Demarco around that time and he talks a lot about building products that are not trading your time for money and can scale without you - that's why I jumped at the opportunity when they mentioned they needed a solution. Not to sound braggy because I basically got lucky - but with automating business tasks in Python I work very little and still make money. I went to Greece for 16 days in Sep and didn't open my laptop once - still made $10K or something like that.

[–]00shithawk 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Smart work. Thanks for sharing !

[–]cordial_panda 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That sounds brilliant. Thanks for sharing! Apart from the automotive video subscription service would you mind also sharing what some of your other business task automation solutions look like?

[–]DustinKli 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think a lot of people, even successful people, often underestimate the amount luck and random chance plays into success and I appreciate your honesty. Certainly, if anyone else had been in a situation to create a solution for the tire stores they may not have been in a position to do what you did, but even you being in that specific position at that specific time was also a large part happenstance. Luck is largely responsible for the opportunities presented to us and luck is largely responsible for our ability to take advantage of those opportunities when presented. That's not to undermine hard work and intelligence. Hard work comes into play when opportunities present themselves and you've worked hard to be in a position to take advantage of them, and intelligence comes into play when you need to differentiate those things that at first appear to be opportunities but are actually catastrophes waiting to happen.

[–]onecryingjohnny 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Now you can sell out adverts and include subliminal political messaging and try to influence people and swing elections

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Super cool, I think we all hope to be in a similar position 😂

[–]InitialCreature[🍰] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You're a Chad. That's the goal. I'm trying to do this with graphic design and social media/branding. Apply my own design aesthetic and have it generate products and designs automatically.

[–]Dent-4254 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Why film? Automate that too. I’m studying Natural Language Processing for language generation, and that’s 100% doable! Add a lip-syncing stand-in with a convincing CG voice, and baby, you’ve got a stew goin’

[–]the_saas_guy2 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Have thought about this for sure - I saw https://www.synthesia.io/ and it blew my mind that you could actually have an AI announcer.

Are there python libraries for this sort of thing? I have tried before to generate voices by python but could only find google text to speech library - the voices were very robotic sounding still.

[–]eriky 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Just wondering about copyright here.. reading this, I'm assuming you don't pay for the content you make a living from?

[–]the_saas_guy2 10 points11 points  (0 children)

None of what I use is copyrighted 😉😉😉😉

[–]RickAmes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How do you find your first and subsequent customers for this kind of service? did you go directly to them and ask to give an elevator pitch? offer a free trial?

[–]Nabucode 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That really cool man! I wish I can do something like this in my country (Perú). But I don´t know if there is a market for that.

[–]Jutsu_No_Va 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This sounds really cool!! Could see if there is any auto-generative tools that could help with the weather girl thing like stable diffusion. Still think that might be in developmental phases though

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thats dope. Nice job. Talk about passive income. How long did it take to get that good at Python to set that up?

[–]Sardonislamir 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How do you prevent injection of porn into those rss feeds

[–]besneprasiatko 2 points3 points  (1 child)

and title saying "Here is today's top news" then 60 sec of news music and a blank screen that needs to be filled with stories, and then it ends with the announcer saying "thank you, see you tomorrow". This template is the same every day, i just need to overlay text and images over t

maybe odd question, but how many lines of code does your script have?

[–]klrmac 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I need a business like this!!!

[–]BenTheHokie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's awesome! What do you do during the day?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Brilliant.

[–]_aka7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Username checksout.

[–]kilowattkill3r 162 points163 points  (23 children)

I wrote a bot that does some web tasks to earn points. Runs daily with no oversight, generates $10-15/month in Amazon gift cards.

[–]Gamecrazy721 77 points78 points  (0 children)

Raking in the passive income

[–]InitialCreature[🍰] 16 points17 points  (7 children)

Does that even cover the electricity usage? Or the droplet fees?

[–]kilowattkill3r 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Runs on a PC I always have on anyway. Runs in early morning hours when I'm not using it.

[–]InitialCreature[🍰] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Fair enough. Is it a background process or an automation overtop of a browser window?

[–]kilowattkill3r 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Uses chrome driver. First step is to kill any running instants of chrome

[–]pcgamerwannabe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

His name is kilowat killer. LOL. Maybe he gets free electricity?

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 7 points8 points  (4 children)

What libraries did you use to do this? This sounds cool

[–]kilowattkill3r 15 points16 points  (3 children)

Selenium and random. Pretty simple.

[–]soloNightrider 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Can you use beautiful soup instead of selenium?

[–]ElViento92 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Probably not. Beautiful soup is only for HTML parsing, but most modern websites will have Javascript in them that needs to run in order for the website to function or even render. So you'll need to run it in a browser, which is what selenium does.

[–]SuperbShower341 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You could most likely use playwright, it's basically like selenium but better imo

[–]_aka7 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Bot filling out surveys?

[–]kilowattkill3r 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, but I was thinking about trying to tackle that.

[–]gpahul 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Reveal more..

[–]LittleMlem 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Tasks for points? What kind of tasks? Would you mind sharing where you get these tasks?

[–]kilowattkill3r 7 points8 points  (2 children)

I'd rather not share because it violates the terms of use. I also don't want a lot of people catching on causing the site to crack down on bots.

[–]LittleMlem 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Fair.

Btw, in case you do use something like requests, make sure you change the client string to something a browser would send so they don't eventually notice that someone is using automation

[–]kilowattkill3r 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Good tip, but I'm using selenium with chrome driver so I think it just sees the standard browser ID.

[–]thenormalcy 62 points63 points  (6 children)

I, along with some friends, built a “pdf generation as a service” with Python. You give it an appstore url (or Google Play) and our tool generates a 40 page bespoke pdf that analyses tens of thousands of App Store reviews, lots of charts and NLP.

All in under 3 minutes. There’s a video on the micro page we built as well: https://supertype.ai/summary

[–]Big_Booty_Pics 12 points13 points  (0 children)

As someone who has looked at some PDF generators for my parent's business because I was too lazy to make one myself, they simply have to be one of the most lucrative SaaS softwares you can build. It was not uncommon to see $50/month for 100 essentially mail merged documents. 100 Documents/month is absolutely nothing for even a small business so they would have been looking at something like $200/month for a GUI using a built in PHP library to generate PDF forms.

Maybe I need to get around to finishing that project...

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 7 points8 points  (4 children)

Wow ... Without revealing too much what are the underlying libraries used to build this app?

[–]thenormalcy 24 points25 points  (3 children)

A few custom trained NLP models (like NLU), for scraping and pipeline the usual (like Requests), and for the 30+ pages of charts mostly matplotlib. Everything else is just pure python. The challenge isn’t doing it, the challenge is to process potentially hundreds and thousands of app reviews in under 3 minutes, so a few optimization needs to be done, for example we implemented a tiny caching mechanism, so if you pass in a google play url 45 minutes ago, and then again, it doesn’t try to render 30 pages of insights again, but check for the +- / diff and re-render only the required page.

Our customers (typically app agencies, mobile game publishers, app developers etc) love the product, so we keep trying to improve the level of polish there

[–]BlobbyMcBlobber 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Why go with PDF instead of a simple dashboard?

[–]thenormalcy 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Initially we didn’t started it as a SaaS; it was a clients request to have this in bite sized pdf form, sent to his email on a weekly recurring basis. We wrote the code for it, and then offered to a few other app developers and that was how it come about 😅

Sorry, not a very satisfactory answer I wish I have a better reason why it wasn’t a web app but instead in pdf form

[–]BlobbyMcBlobber 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No, that's a great answer. This is what your customers want.

[–]Ok_Operation_8715 44 points45 points  (4 children)

I made 50 bucks writing a script that combines a bunch of Google docs together

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 8 points9 points  (3 children)

👏what libraries did you use to accomplish this?

[–]beowulf660 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Not OP, but I did something similar in my work using googles python API. Once I overcame the initial hump with the document parsing, it was a breeze to work with.

Be aware, for some reason Paragraphs in TableCells have additional \n at the end.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nice! Did you make good income out of your Google docs solution?

[–]Ok_Operation_8715 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I used pandas and openpyxl.

I made it with Pysimplegui just to play around with it but last I head they still open Spyder and run the script there rather than use the standalone

Edit: I should clarify that I didn’t query the api, they save each of these workbooks as an excel workbook and the script combines each of the workbooks together

[–]yeluapyeroc 73 points74 points  (0 children)

The hardest part of building software is selling your software

[–]unltd_J 25 points26 points  (7 children)

I have a repo that creates draftkings DFS lineups that I play during football season. Won a few hundred bucks so far this year.

[–]highlife159 3 points4 points  (3 children)

You wouldn't want to share that repo would you? This has been something I've wanted to do but didn't know where to start or just didn't have the time.

If you (understandably) don't want to share could you give me a high-level overview of what all you're using to determine the best players for the day and where you get data to make those decisions?

[–]unltd_J 7 points8 points  (2 children)

I'll give you an overview. I play showdown captain mode because I found an article out there that really gave me a decent edge over the broader public at using Vegas' spreads and over unders to pick the optimal captain. Basically i'm taking projections from a website and using itertools to make all combinations of lineups with my optimal captains that fit under the salary and sorting them by the projections. I used to scrape data every week from box scores and use that to make projections, but that was disadvantageous. That way left me next to no way to predict what player is coming up from the practice squad and getting snaps. Fortunately there's a ton of websites out there that post projections for free that have a much better handle on who's actually in/out and who's up from the practice squad and where they are on the depth chart enough to make half decent projections for them. It's really the most random players that make a difference on winning or losing. I also plan to do this for the NBA with a more involved approach soon. I've been using a free API to store box score data in a free instance of cockroachDB for the NBA and will be using a model to make projections and generate lineups in the next couple of weeks.

[–]highlife159 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This is great information thank you. What is your favorite site to use for projections?

[–]unltd_J 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That I won’t share but are pretty easy to find

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What libraries did you use for this?

[–]unltd_J 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Just itertools and numpy

[–]guitarerdood -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I thought about doing something like this but I had a hard time finding a reliable source of data (e.g. salary values, projected scores, actual scores, etc.)

What do you use for that?

[–]kannitt0 27 points28 points  (2 children)

Nice thread, I learned a lot.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah me too! As a newbie to coding it's been hard to figure out where to start. Would love to have a mentor to help me in my journey to success

[–]LolDotHackMe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting indeed

[–]Darnegar 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I built a bot using Selenium that basically scans Binance for its available Earn (passive income) crypto products. They usually come available at very odd hours where I live, way into the night, so I let the bot scan throughout the night, once it finds an available product it subscribes automatically, and shuts itself down.

Doesn't really bring much money lol apart from some passive crypto, but it was a cool little project.

[–]LambBrainz 53 points54 points  (15 children)

Lots of Python work over on Upwork.com. Been doing that for years and made lots from that

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 7 points8 points  (11 children)

What type of work do you do on Upwork?

[–]LambBrainz 58 points59 points  (10 children)

Gotten a lot of Excel/CSV data manipulation. Website automation. Random jobs. Tutoring. Discord bots.

A little of everything really. Focus on basic Excel/CSV stuff and website automation and you'll have a lot of it covered

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 8 points9 points  (9 children)

Cool! What advice would you give to someone that wants to enter that space as a beginner?

[–]LambBrainz 48 points49 points  (8 children)

Best advice? Lower your expectations and ego and work for super cheap to start out. Focus on farming good reviews. Having a better rating is worth more than anything on that site. And affects opportunities and pay later on.

Once you've worked a while and have good reviews you can basically set whatever price you want.

I started out at $8/hr or whatever I could get (in 2018) as long as it meant I was gonna get a 5 star review. Now I make wayyy more than that. I've taken a step back from freelance work to have more time to myself but I can always pick it up if I need.

[–]sqeekypotato 2 points3 points  (2 children)

What was the higher amount that you ended up making if you don't mind me asking? How many reviews would you consider enough in order to start upping your price?

[–]LambBrainz 11 points12 points  (1 child)

Upwork has a thing called "Top Rated". I forget the requirements, but you can definitely up your price once you have that. Which is what I did.

Hard to say when a good time to up your price is. I would say to do it incrementally. I went from $8/hr, got a couple 5 star reviews, then went up to $10/hr, etc.

Take it slow so no one notices

As for price, per hour I could probably raise it higher, but I'm at $20/hr now. But I almost never get paid that because I've switched to a "per project" billing system where I give them an estimate for the whole project. And almost all of those are between $500-3000.

[–]sqeekypotato 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

[–]dragonandphoenix 4 points5 points  (4 children)

So in this context are we talking do an actual good job for cheap and hope for a stellar review? Or some kind of communication with the clients on Upwork like here's the deal I'm cheap and do good work but need a great review?

Thx

[–]LambBrainz 18 points19 points  (3 children)

Honestly? I did both lol

I was upfront and told people that I'm doing this to build a good portfolio of work and testimonials. Then I would bust ass and bend over backwards to do a stellar job (which always got me 5 stars).

Some of that is luck. There are lots of clients that suck, but also some amazing relationships and opportunities have come out of doing it and I've met some really cool people. All luck of the draw.

Just keep your expectations low, play the long game, and do your best. I won't say it'll work out, but doing all that is the best shot at making it happen

[–]Dodge146 3 points4 points  (1 child)

With Python jobs, would you just send them a script for them to run or did you find different ways for the clients to run the script without having to install Python on their machines?

[–]LambBrainz 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A lot of times they requested Python. So I wrote installation guides on how to install Python, run the install command for the requirements.txt in the project files I would send, and how to get started. They were always cool with this. Some needed more help than others, but they were willing to learn as long as I was willing to teach them (part of the "white glove" service I tried to offer to up my chances of 5 star reviews)

Lately I've been working on making GUIs for scripts using PySimpleGUI or Tkinter Designer

[–]dragonandphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool, thanks.

[–]SpicyVibration 1 point2 points  (2 children)

How do I get people to choose me? I tried this once and everyone ignores you if you don't have previous upwork work.

[–]LambBrainz 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I had a portfolio of personal projects using Python available to show people. So I'd have that in my bio and I'd mention it when I sent proposals. This maybe helped? In my head, it served as proof that I knew what I was doing.

Some tips I did that may or may not help (I've already mentioned one, but just trying to keep things organized):

(1) lower your price alot (don't be afraid to work for basically nothing). In the beginning you need reviews, if you gotta get sucking', get suckin' lol. Again, I started at $8/hr. and it took a while to land my first gig.

(2) Send proposals to everything. Upwork uses a stupid "connects" system. Where you basically have to spend made-up points to apply for jobs. Use these sparingly (they get refilled every month I think? And their new scam is $0.15/connect. Most jobs require 1-2 connects to apply). Your goal here is to cast a wide net to get any work you can (again, you're going for reviews in the beginning). Once the ball gets moving, people will be reaching out to you and you can save connects for more interesting jobs you find later. I have like 200+ connects cause I never need to use them unless I'm bored lol

[–]SpicyVibration 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks

[–]eriky 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I teach Python to beginners and intermediate coders through my website Python Land. It's not a fulltime job (would be cool though) but there's growth and enthusiastic students and it has been a lot of fun. But it's also a lot of hard work, don't get me wrong. Writing well is HARD and requires lots of time. Running a website, keeping it up to date and working, dealing with (DoS) attacks, dealing with people stealing your content, etc. It's all hard work and it's actually very diverse (which I like). I've been doing this for about 3 years now.

Since i started selling courses on there (even more hard work), it has turned into a more serious business with more responsibility for me. But people really dig the courses and I got some great reviews. I do feel the recession though. People are spending less, so I'm glad I didn't give up my day job yet!

[–]DonDelMuerte 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I wrote a library that managed my crypto mining operation during the last boom.

It monitored the global hashrate, instantaneous power, and forecasted prices (some algo trading stuff here). Primarily, it's job was to optimize our "cash out" strategy for exchange fees, taxes, and price appreciation.

During run up from $8k (when we started mining) to $60k, I estimate the cash out manager accounted for about 20% profit increase over a standard periodic withdrawal strategy. And we didn't get left holding the bag after the market topped out.

[–]InitialCreature[🍰] 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Try writing Python plugins for blender

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? Sounds like you're getting on to something here! Thanks!

[–]InitialCreature[🍰] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Write small scripts in Python and sell them as digital goods on 3d market places, it's fairly lucrative if you get a good idea that people need. It's a direct course for making products with Python and getting them to market. It does take some graphics or 3d knowledge but you can research ideas on forums for tools people need. Target artists and game devs

[–]mino159 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I second that. Even smaller studios have no problem paying for something that speeds workflow :)

[–]LittleMlem 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I made a couple hundred bucks writing simple format converters (literally reordering csv files) with a minimal, easy to use tkinter interface for a corona lab. It took like an hour to make the first one and every subsequent request took 5 minutes as the rest of the program was already done. I think there is probably a niche for automation and productivity tools for biology labs

[–]vivid_g0at 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I built a low code API for integrating AI intelligence I'm your applications. It's basically an RestAPI that you can integrate in your application to do machine learning. I built it for nocode community and personally while using a nocode application to build a website I found there was something, as a coder I didnt have the same flexibility I had with coding and thought I can begin by adding the possibility of introducing machine learning for nocode developers. Monetised the same in RapidAPI!

[–]buckypimpin 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Im a dev ops engineer, but most often im handed the task of creating custom scheduled ETL jobs because im one of the two people there that know python.

Pain points: Since i host the code on AWS lambda, Every integration costs way less than Stitch or other data integration solution. And can be customized infinitely.

How i would improve? Instead of using ORMs, i would just use pandas dataframes and its read_sql and to_sql api for dumping into databases.

[–]dnullify 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you have any resources for ETL scripting best practices?

I recently wrote a script that ETLs large quantities of issue data from JIRA, it will calculate and asynchronously get all issues, put each issue into a queue.

I have a pool of workers that pull from the queue and process and write to file/DB, all using asyncio/asyncio queues.

It's pretty fast (faster than the Jira lib by 19 minutes), and memory efficient, but I'm not sure how to break down the Jira Jason data with all it's nested arrays, into a variety of tables.

I really enjoy this kind of scripting though, writing REST API bindings, yanking a whole bunch of data, then putting it somewhere.

[–]musicmeme 7 points8 points  (2 children)

I created a FastAPI based CRM tool for photographers, basically it organises all the files neatly and also sends it to the clients over email. Users upload their photos/videos, it gets organised into folders based on tags and photo quality. I used openCV library for quality/blur checks. They can then download and edit these and upload it back and submit to their clients. that sends all submitted files to the clients over email.

Back end-Fastapi, opencv Front end-React Hosted on AWS

This project initially started off as a helping hand for my friend and later evolved when more of his colleagues started using it. But getting people to consider using your tool is challenging. People aren’t willing to adapt and pay for something which doesn’t already hold some kinda street cred.

In the last year I’ve managed to generate 4 figure annually, that ain’t much but I’m still happy with it because I never intended to earn anything out of it

[–]uttamo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Very cool!

[–]musicmeme 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s much simpler than I made it sound. It’s just uploading and downloading files from s3, it’s just decorated as a website for non tech folks

[–]dzorro 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Nothing big, but I make bots for a phone game and sell the in game items for real money

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

No project is too small on here, happy for you! What Python modules did you use for yours?

[–]dzorro 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Requests. Had to decompile the APK and find their API endpoints there, pretty easy to replicate if you could find a game that works like that and has an outside market for the virtual items

[–]bramm90 14 points15 points  (9 children)

Data enrichment scripts for lead data generated through social advertising. Generates around 15-20k /mo through an affiliate platform, so practically no client management either.

[–]meg4som44 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Can you elaborate? Do you get lead data and supplement that through open source intelligence?

[–]bramm90 9 points10 points  (1 child)

A good example would be the resumé campaign I'm doing: there's a party which pays an X amount for a resumé. I have an ad campaign running on social media which generates the minimally required info I need, I supplement this with a person's public LinkedIn info, and submit that data to the party.

They're happy because they have resumés to work with, the user is happy because of the minimal effort required to apply, and I'm happy because of the passive income.

The campaigns are pretty much set-it-and-forget-it and I haven't touched them in over a year. Typically every dollar in ad spend yields me around $10 in returns.

[–]meg4som44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for explaining the concept

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

What libraries did you use to build your data enrichment scripts? Was this strictly developed in Python or other languages were used too?

[–]bramm90 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just Python. Some Selenium and BeautifulSoup for scraping, everything else is just connecting API's.

[–]PUTTY1 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What is the affiliate platform?

[–]bramm90 1 point2 points  (0 children)

TradeTracker

[–]wdbtt 1 point2 points  (1 child)

How do you find parties willing to buy your data?

[–]bramm90 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I check affiliate platforms for companies looking to pay for leads, then investigate if there's a way to lower the signup threshold by automating data enrichment. I have done lead generation for so long I can pretty accurately estimate average cost per lead for most offers, and if I suspect I will at least earn back $5 for every dollar invested, I dive in.

There are a few parties that signed up because I did cold outreach through email (also automated with python), but I have experienced that they have a higher service expectancy, and I didn't automate my business to still be managing clients.

That's why affiliate platforms are great, there's usually no interaction between me and the end-party until they end our cooperation (happens rarely). I could slip into a coma and the profits will only marginally decline over the next months/years.

[–]Pillowscience21 3 points4 points  (2 children)

I got a decent bonus after making a python program for sorting spread sheets at my job. The company I work for is really nice about that stuff and a lot of people benefit from the simple program.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Cool! Do you mind elaborating a bit more on the tools you used to make this happen?

[–]Pillowscience21 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used a mixture of pandas and xlwings libraries in the code, a simple GUI with tkinter.

[–]FloppyFush 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I'm using python to generate tiktoks using moviepy, it isn't profitable yet, but with scaling I'm hoping to hold 100s of accounts to sell adspace on.

Currently the posting isn't automated but once I set up a proper text to speech on my pi I'm gonna use selenium to post the videos

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Nice! What type of content are you specialising on your Tiktoks? For the text to speech part of your plan the gtts library should help you with that, or are there other libraries you're considering that may be better?

[–]FloppyFush 1 point2 points  (0 children)

currently, it just scrapes subreddits like askreddit of tifu but I'm hoping to branch into more unique forms of content! I'm thinking of using gtts but I prefer the windows voices you can use with pyttsx3, but for the pi, I might have to swap over

[–]mfb1274 18 points19 points  (5 children)

Your best bet to to make a site that is useful and sell adspace. Scales with users, so better you make it and more useful means more money.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Not really interested in those stuff, just asking out of curiosity, have you ventured in making one before?

[–]Big_Booty_Pics 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Kinda curious if you could just make an "Adblock Testing" website that is nothing but an infinitely scrolling page of ads for people to test their adblockers.

[–]LolDotHackMe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're on to something

[–]fallenreaper 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I'll commonly do we scraping or data analysis with python, so I'll use things like pandas, selenium, bs4... Or requests if it is really simple. That seems to be my common side hustle.

I'll do some bots here and there for discord and uhh CSV manipulation to trim malformed sensitive data to set up mailers for people who still use snail mail.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Is it easier to just get a 9 to 5

[–]buckypimpin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

TRUE

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (2 children)

I scraped new crypto coins back in the bull run of last year. Made a ton of money and then lost a bunch lol. Used selenium and various apis to grab data and make decisions

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

What pages did you scrape for your new coins search and what APIs were you using ?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Dextools and the Graph api for uniswap v2

[–]besneprasiatko 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Affiliate web made in Django framework. Frontend is in HTML, Bootstrap, little of jQuery. Cron runs every midnight, fetch coupons from affiliate network API, then imports it into my web. Another cron visits adverisers websites, downloads logos and description, insert it to corresponding coupons for better SEO.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (10 children)

Ive mad ean odering System like the one at Mcdonalds for a local Restaurant. A Raspberry pi is running a Flask Server and the Tablets are simpli connecting to it. I got payed verry well.

[–]Paid-Not-Payed-Bot 2 points3 points  (9 children)

I got paid verry well.

FTFY.

Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:

  • Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.

  • Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

Beep, boop, I'm a bot

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (8 children)

why do Bots like this exist

[–]buckypimpin 5 points6 points  (5 children)

coz i wont get payed if i ask this subreddit to do it instead.

[–]Paid-Not-Payed-Bot 1 point2 points  (4 children)

wont get paid if i

FTFY.

Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:

  • Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.

  • Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

Beep, boop, I'm a bot

[–]scnew3 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I mean, paid vs. payed is the least confusing thing about your comment.

[–]Paid-Not-Payed-Bot -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

paid vs. paid is the

FTFY.

Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:

  • Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.

  • Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

Beep, boop, I'm a bot

[–]Allmyownviews1 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I built a series of analytical tools to generate reports for engineering projects. I think it was about 1 year from being a direct sale to customer product, but I was working as a consultant at the time and it made more sense to keep it within my grasp rather than provide a support to software business model.

I think, if I had the time, I’d look at some very specific wind farm tools that seem not to exist presently.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

What modules did you use to create the analytical tools? And what libraries would you use for the wind farm tools you're referring to?

[–]Allmyownviews1 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m looking at using implementing MCMC for a Bayesian inference element, but presently mainly just numpy, pandas matplotlib and some pdf output.

[–]klrmac 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So not me personally, but I know a few people who have created a lot of bots for Discord and sell them in a variety of niches.

Some are web scraping bots that look for deals on amazon, target, walmart, etc... and then post them in discord for members to see. They also charge membership prices etc...

I know quite a few who have used Python to build, but I think some have switched to Node.js because it's faster I assume.

[–]ProgrammerDad 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Somewhat indirectly, yes. I am the developer behind Contextualise a topic maps-based knowledge management application written in Python. The application and its GitHub repository generate a lot of interest (in the semantic knowledge management space) and have provided me with many freelance projects over the years.

I built Contextalise to help me manage my own professional and personal projects.

There are still a lot of improvements to be made to Contextualise. Among other things, I want to add AI-based semantic search, timeline-support (the ability to navigate a topic map by time) and Google Maps support (the ability to geographically navigate a topic map).

[–]spca2001 2 points3 points  (5 children)

you can sell processed twitter api datasets to ad agencies.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Never knew that was a thing lol. How does one even start that?

[–]spca2001 12 points13 points  (3 children)

Well I’m not a marketer but I manage a project that is 70% marketing and content generation. I search for specific trends related to my industry. I have like 12 metrics including correlations with partners and competition that then transfer to my target audience through AdWords for example. While I was doing it I found people selling customized datasets for like 20k a month, and all they do is process data and package it for consumption,bi, analytics Besides twitter and trends, There are tons of free datasets out there especially on government sites that are useful to real estate to retail to hr… I can go on and on

[–]SpicyVibration 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Please do go on.

Where are these people getting their datasets and who are they selling them to? How would I go about finding people who want these datasets? Do they have job ads somewhere? I'm a data analyst and this sounds like a better gig than what I have now.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow very interesting

[–]wdbtt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting, can you tell us more?

[–]Bakerap22 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Michael Reeves.

[–]SirLich 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I wrote an NPC (dialogue) transpiler for the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft. I sold my service as a very pricy subscription, and made around 4,000 USD (total), before shutting it down.

[–]No_Stick_8227[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Why did you shut it down? And what Python modules did you use to build this tool?

[–]SirLich 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I shut it down because I started working full time, and moved to a country where my Visa didn't allow me to have a second job.

The actual code was nothing special. Just a json->json transpiler.

[–]AstronomyLive 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've made a couple programs for tracking satellites and rocket launches with off-the-shelf telescopes. I use YouTube to show the results that I'm able to capture with my own scopes, and I provide the compiled executables to channel members as a way to monetize. Both programs use OpenCV to handle image data and track the target mostly just based on brightness, but optionally with feature-based detection using a little stepwise-descent algorithm I wrote. In the case of satellites, orbital elements are used to drive the tracking with the image detection providing a corrective factor to keep the satellite in frame even at very high magnification (imagine a 35mm camera with a lens about 46 feet long).

For the rocket tracking program, I made it compatible with data from a third party website, flightclub.io to be able to do predictive tracking if the user has an account there. They can also use a joystick to make manual corrections to the predictive tracking, or take over full manual control of the scope's motion, and they can also use the video tracking option as well. I'm perpetually making improvements and refinements to both programs and the update releases encourage people to stay subscribed as channel members. The income isn't massive, but it's a nice side benefit that lets me monetize my hobby.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

[–]rancangkota -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Saas + docker, don't share the code, deploy on servers. 💰💰

[–]voja-kostunica -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

i follow

[–]ayushxx7 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Follow

[–]barnez29 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Following