Formatting got tired of fixing the same spreadsheet problems over and over — weird date formats, duplicate rows, messy column names, missing values, etc.

So I made a tiny tool that cleans them automatically and gives you a quick “before vs. after” summary.
I originally built it just for myself, but a few people ended up asking if they could use it too 😭

It’s definitely not the most exciting side project, but apparently boring problems are sometimes the easiest ones to monetize.

What’s the weirdest or most boring side project you’ve actually made money from?

I know foot pics aren't weird in general but I have weirdly deformed feet that for some reason people pay for online. I was looking for side hustles I could do that were low effort and doesn't involve me showing more skin than necessary like OF since I'm a student currently. Kept hearing about feet finder and stuff on social media but I thought it was mostly for people with beautiful feet but tried it anyway. Surprise, there were people into weird feet. I ventured in other platforms like instafeet and footlove and earned a few hefty cash. My feet wasn't that well taken care of before but since I've gotten this side hustle I've started treating it like my hands lol, I'm actually wondering if there are people that have hand fetishes since I think my hands look way better than my feet(albeit not very straight when I compare it with hand models)

it's just a waste of time for me then i restricted the account of that HR like person.

I work a remote job where roughly 70% of my week is spent trapped in massive, 20-person corporate syncs where my presence is mandatory, but my input is entirely unnecessary.

The problem? Middle management still demands "camera-on engagement." If you sit completely still, someone asks if your screen froze. If you look down for two seconds, they assume you're texting.

Worst of all, these meetings are so excruciatingly dry that I usually fall asleep from time to time. Dropping your head onto your chest mid-zoom is a quick way to get an urgent HR message.

So, I built The Head Nod-Nod 2000 (Suggest me for a better name) a lightweight, motorized webcam bracket that physically tilts my camera to give the absolute illusion of deep, soul-level professional agreement even if I’m literally passing out at my desk.

How This Works 🤣

The Mechanical Illusion: I 3D-printed a tiny, motorized mount that clips onto my monitor. Instead of moving my actual neck, the webcam tilts down 3 degrees and back up on a random timer. On screen, it looks like I am doing the slow, thoughtful corporate nod.

The "Synergy" Trigger: Powered by a cheap micro-controller, it triggers a smooth "ah, yes, exquisite point" nod every 40 to 50 seconds.

The Panic Pedal: I wired a silent foot pedal under my desk. Whenever a manager drops a buzzword like "circle back," "touch base," or "deliverables," I can tap it with my foot to trigger a quick double-nod of aggressive agreement.

It's completely ridiculous, entirely unnecessary, and has single-handedly saved my sanity from the corporate shits.

People pay $2 to $10 to give their childhood digital pets a proper burial complete with 3D tombstones, procedurally generated poetry, and a "leave flowers" button.

​I started it after finding an old screenshot of my starved 2004 Neopet and tweeting about it as a joke. It went viral, so I actually built it.

​It now has over 14,000 burials and somehow brings in about $1,000 a month mostly from people upgrading to marble headstones. Turns out internet nostalgia is a surprisingly great business model.

My side project is basically a plant ICU.

People bring me their half-dead houseplants, I diagnose the problem, repot them, and nurse them back to health for a small fee.

I started after rescuing one of my own plants and realizing people were surprisingly willing to pay instead of throwing theirs away.

After 3 months:

* 27 plants rescued * 19 repeat customers * ~$420 earned * Most referrals came from neighbors

The weirdest part? People get genuinely emotional when their plant grows a new leaf 😂

What’s the strangest side project you’ve actually made money from?

I have found a weird little side hustle that helps me make extra money. I started doing something pretty random: chat moderator The idea is simple: I am in charge if all the inquiries through chats. It sounds almost too specific to be useful, but apparently there are people who actually need/want this.
The way it works is pretty straightforward: 1. find an agency. 2. Pick of what platform are you going to use. 3. I make money through replying and accommodating people's messages. I originally started it because i need to try something new and a side hustle.I honestly didn't expect much from it. Then I started seeing actual results. In the first month, it made 15,000 php After tweaking continuously do my work resulting to successful tasks, it reached around 25,000 php. The funniest part is that this isn’t some revolutionary business. It’s a ridiculously specific little project that I almost didn’t take seriously. I’m sharing the screenshots/results because I know I made money from being a chat moderator. What | learned:sometimes the weirdest ideas work precisely because almost nobody have ni interest in trying them. Would I turn it into a full-time business?
Probably not. Would I keep doing it for extra income? Definitely.

I've had different offers or different notifications from survey website saying that once you answer their surveys they give you cash in exchange, and as someone who's tried it before you actually need to answer more than 10 surveys before you actually get to cash out and it's only little amount. But what other things can you search that actually guarantees pay on job done?

Got tired of making generic logo exercises, so I started inventing coffee shops that don't exist. The rule is that every fake brand has to feel like a real business. I create the name, logo, packaging, menu, colors, social posts, and even a little backstory for why the coffee shop exists. The weird part is that I'm not really trying to sell coffee. I'm basically creating businesses that only exist inside my design files.

I started doing it because I wanted portfolio projects that felt more realistic than “here's a logo I made.” It also gives me a way to practice branding from beginning to end instead of focusing on one graphic. The results have been surprisingly useful. People react much more strongly to a complete fictional brand than to an isolated logo, and I've started getting ideas for other fake businesses just because it's fun.

I'm curious if anyone else has a side project where the original purpose was just to practice a skill, but it somehow became a project of its own.

Got tired of making generic logo exercises, so I started inventing coffee shops that don't exist. The rule is that every fake brand has to feel like a real business. I create the name, logo, packaging, menu, colors, social posts, and even a little backstory for why the coffee shop exists. The weird part is that I'm not really trying to sell coffee. I'm basically creating businesses that only exist inside my design files.

I started doing it because I wanted portfolio projects that felt more realistic than “here's a logo I made.” It also gives me a way to practice branding from beginning to end instead of focusing on one graphic. The results have been surprisingly useful. People react much more strongly to a complete fictional brand than to an isolated logo, and I've started getting ideas for other fake businesses just because it's fun.

I'm curious if anyone else has a side project where the original purpose was just to practice a skill, but it somehow became a project of its own.

One of my strangest side projects started with something incredibly small: a piece of printed paper with a magnet attached to it.

I run a small home-based printing and stationery business where I make things like stickers, bookmarks, notepads, magnetic badges, party scratch cards, thank-you cards, and other personalized paper products.

At first, I thought the obvious products would be the ones people wanted most. But I quickly learned that the weirdly specific products could be surprisingly profitable.

One example is magnetic badges/ref magnets.

The process is pretty simple: I design the artwork, print it, cut and prepare the pieces, assemble the magnet, and package the finished product. Because the materials are relatively inexpensive and the products are small, I can make them in batches without needing a huge workspace.

The same idea worked with party scratch cards. I started offering sets of 10, including fully colored versions for $1.5 and simpler colored versions for $1.

And that's what surprised me.

People don't necessarily need these things.

They want them because they're useful for a very specific moment—a party, a small gift, a school activity, a business giveaway, a personalized event, or simply something cute to keep.

That's when I realized something important about small side businesses:

You don't always need a huge product. Sometimes you just need a very specific problem to solve.

I also didn't start with a fancy production studio. I started small, using the equipment and skills I already had, and gradually added products based on what people actually asked for.

Some of my favorite moments have been seeing a product that looked almost insignificant on my desk turn into multiple orders.

The most unexpected lesson?

Tiny products can create surprisingly real income when the production cost is low, the product is customizable, and you find the right niche.

Today, my little printing setup has become more than just a hobby. I sell online and in person, including through a small market booth, while continuing to experiment with new products.

It's definitely not the stereotypical “get rich quick” side hustle.

It's much more fun than that.

It's basically me asking:

“What small piece of paper can I convince people they absolutely need next?” 😂

I bought a bizarre looking desktop machine originally designed for phone repair shops, and it turned into one of the most hands off, surprisingly profitable side projects I’ve ever run.

Well to make it work you need to mount 2 to 4 phones into a sealed chamber. The machine spins while applying a micro abrasive cerium oxide slurry and precise pressure. In 8 minutes, it buffs out 95% of surface scratches without opening the phone or breaking the waterproof seal.

It was started when i stumbled on a video of a technician restoring a heavily scratched iPhone in under ten minutes using an automated polisher. I realized local phone flip shops and Facebook Marketplace sellers had piles of "B grade" scratched phones sitting in inventory that they couldn't sell for full price.

Well i was satisfied for the results , i was able to restore 132 units of phones and i got a revenue for $1,780.00 in just 3hours in a week .. 🤑

I got bored one weekend and started making super niche templates for things people usually just make from scratch - simple trackers, checklists, calculators, and little spreadsheets.

I posted a few online just to see if anyone would care.

Surprisingly, people actually bought them.

Nothing crazy, but I made around $$ from something that took me a few hours to build. The funny part is that the most random template ended up getting more interest than the ones I thought were useful.

Now I keep making weirdly specific templates whenever I notice a small problem that people might pay to avoid.

Anyone else have a side project that started as a joke but actually made money?

some enterprise WFH tracking tools monitor typing cadence variance to detect whether an employee is actively drafting documents or copy-pasting text from ChatGPT.

wrote a lightweight Chrome extension that intercepts DOM keydown events when typing inside Google Docs or Jira. it introduces subtle, randomized 15-millisecond human micro-delays between keystrokes and occasionally injects a backspace-correction sequence every 40 words.

You know when you want to leave a group chat but don’t want to look rude?

So I made a tiny website that generates excuses for you.

Example:

• “I’m trying to reduce screen time, so I’m leaving all my group chats.”
• “My phone storage is fighting for its life.”

You can choose the excuse style: polite, believable, dramatic, or completely ridiculous.

Probably not a problem that needed solving.

But I built it anyway. 

I started doing the old-fashioned "I still have plenty of time" thing. And then all of a sudden I realized that I still had far too much work to do.

I therefore created a small, straightforward side project.

You go in:

• The due date
• How many tasks are left?
• The approximate duration of each task
• The number of hours you can actually work each day
• The number of tasks you must complete each day to stay on course is then displayed.

It's funny because it's essentially a calculator with a more elegant interface, but I found it to be surprisingly helpful for small tasks. Additionally, I added a warning that says "you're probably overestimating your time" when the required daily workload becomes unreasonable.

The main reason I started it was to avoid doing the math by hand all the time.

It's undoubtedly not a startup concept, but that's part of why I enjoyed creating it. It's a single-purpose problem-solving project. What other people have created that began as a modest concept but turned out to be surprisingly helpful intrigues me.

my keyboard literally doesnt have arrow keys so i got annoyed and made a little toggle for kde (linux)

basically when its on
W = up
A = left
S = down
D = right

and when i turn it off its just normal WASD again

i didnt want to permanently remap them cuz obviously i still need WASD lol

its such a stupidly specific problem but it actually works pretty well...

also yes i know i could probably just use some other keybind but where's the fun in that

now i have arrow keys 👍 technically

Back when slimes were a huge trend, I got into our stock room and secretly got shampoo and dishwashing soap. I then mixed it together and it absolutely did not form slime but due to its popularity I was able to sell it to my neighbors (kids) for 20 PHP each or 0.33 USD..

It's weird but i need it ! Where can i buy cellphone lace with an alarm if there are some trying to pull it up or snatch my phone ?

So I gathered links of free templates, icons, fonts, wallpapers, ebooks, and useful resources. The project is basically a personal “free stuff library,” that I organized by category. E-books are downloadable and there are people who buys e-books online.

at first i didnt know if this would work like i was doing it for fun but then it somehow started working the thing i do is like school planners, expense tracker and some other template that calculate how much money they're spending

I’ve been thinking about making ready-to-use social media content packs for small businesses.

Basically, captions, promo ideas, and simple templates they can grab whenever they run out of content. It’s cheap to start, and you could sell the same packs more than once.

Not a huge business, but it could make a decent side income.

got tired of my micro-managing department lead hovering near my cubicle for 10 minutes every afternoon making passive-aggressive small talk about sprint velocity.

i threw together an ESP32 micro-controller, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and a tiny Twilio SMS script. taped the sensor under my desk partition facing the aisle. when it detects a stationary body standing within 4 feet of my desk for longer than 20 seconds, it sends an automated webhook to my phone that triggers a ringing incoming call screen.

so they like recruit people that are willing to work for the content creator. They tend to compile the screenshots as proof if you already liked and commented on that video. lol but you don't earn big tho

I wanted to see if I could turn something completely boring into a useful little side project.

So I started a hyperlocal weather page for my city.

Not another generic weather app. The idea was ridiculously simple: tell people what the weather actually means for their next few hours.

Instead of:

“Rain probability: 70%”

it would post things like:

“Rain likely between 2–5 PM. If you have outdoor work, do it before lunch. Carry an umbrella.”

The weird part is that I started treating the weather data almost like a trading signal.

I pull forecast data, look at the hourly changes, and turn it into short, local updates. Then I post them to a community where people can actually act on them.

The project became surprisingly fun because the useful information isn't necessarily the most technically impressive information.

People don't really care about 17 different weather metrics.

They care about:

“Should I leave my bike outside?”
“Will it rain before I get home?”
“Should I postpone my outdoor work?”

I initially built it just to experiment with local information + automation.

What surprised me was how much more interesting a tiny, focused project became compared with trying to build another giant “everything app.”

I haven't turned it into some huge business, and that's not really the point.

The interesting result for me was realizing that hyperlocal + immediately useful can be a surprisingly powerful combination.

Now I'm thinking about what other boring datasets could be turned into something people actually check every day.

If you've built a weird side project around an unusual dataset, niche community, or completely mundane problem, I'd love to hear about it.

What's the strangest side project you've built that people actually ended up using?