The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2017–2022
Cory Zue bets open side-project books: $336K profit, then closed in 2022
Public dashboard of Place Card Me, SaaS Pegasus and Chat Stats: $336.6K profit on 2,760 hours, $122/hour, then the books closed in 2022.
Cory Zue
What the business is
Cory Zue's side-project portfolio — Place Card Me for online place cards, Chat Stats for GroupMe analytics, and SaaS Pegasus, a Django-powered SaaS starter kit — sold as small web products and documented dollar-for-dollar on a public Open Project Dashboard.
How it started
Cory Zue, posting on Hacker News as czue, said he had spent the previous four years doing the solopreneur thing on the side while meticulously tracking time on each project. The dashboard opened with three products — Place Card Me (May 2017), Chat Stats (Dec 2017) and SaaS Pegasus (June 2019) — and on 2020-12-29 he shared it as 'Show HN: Four years of profitable side-projects', arguing the data proved product businesses take a long time to get off the ground but can really pay off eventually.
What happened
The three projects earned very unevenly: Place Card Me returned $83.6K on 565 hours ($148/hour), Chat Stats $7.9K on 138 hours ($57/hour), and SaaS Pegasus, launched two years after the first, $245.1K on 2,061 hours ($119/hour). HN commenters told Zue the open numbers inspired their own revenue retrospectives, and he kept publishing monthly numbers for two more years, with the page's profit and effort charts running through 2022.
How it ended up
In November 2022 Zue stopped publishing the data and linked the dashboard to 'Farewell, Building in Public': sharing revenue had come to feel like bragging, transparency attracted copycats who could study his strategy, and years of monthly retrospectives had become a crutch, so he was moving from 'radically transparent' to 'thoughtfully transparent' and taking bigger swings. The dashboard stayed online as an archive, noting it might still inspire someone early in their journey.
Background
Cory Zue's Open Project Dashboard documented a portfolio bet instead of a single startup: one developer running several small web products — Place Card Me for making place cards online (May 2017), Chat Stats for GroupMe analytics (December 2017) and SaaS Pegasus, a Django-powered SaaS starter kit (June 2019) — while publishing every hour worked and every dollar earned.
The totals on the page were $336.6K profit from 2,760 hours, an effective rate of $122/hour. The products earned very unevenly: Place Card Me returned $83.6K on 565 hours, Chat Stats $7.9K on 138 hours, and SaaS Pegasus, started two years after the first, $245.1K on 2,061 hours.
On 2020-12-29 Zue posted the page to Hacker News as 'Show HN: Four years of profitable side-projects'. It drew 145 points and 33 comments, and commenters told him the open numbers inspired their own retrospectives; he replied that product businesses can take a long time to get off the ground but can really pay off eventually.
The public run ended in November 2022. In 'Farewell, Building in Public' Zue said the milestones now felt like bragging, transparency attracted copycats and exposed his strategy, and years of monthly retrospectives had become a crutch — so he stopped sharing revenue and went from 'radically transparent' to 'thoughtfully transparent', leaving the dashboard online as an archive.
What has to be true
- Profitability, not growth, was the scoreboard: by publishing total profit, hours and dollars per hour, Zue forced every product to earn its keep and gave readers a concrete number to benchmark.
- Narrow niches kept each project within one person's reach — 138 to 2,061 logged hours per product — so the portfolio never needed a team or outside capital.
- Later products compounded on earlier ones: the largest profit ($245.1K) came from SaaS Pegasus, launched in June 2019 after Place Card Me had already shown the pattern worked in May 2017.
- Even a successful transparency practice has a shelf life: when revenue milestones felt like bragging and posts drew copycats, Zue chose privacy — the same openness has costs at scale.
What can be applied
Transparency built the audience and accountability for years, but at scale the same openness fed copycats and bragging fatigue until Zue closed the books.
Aftermath
As of the 2026-09-05 crawl the Open Project Dashboard remains online but frozen: a banner says Zue stopped publishing the data in November 2022 and points to 'Farewell, Building in Public'. Its cumulative figures — $336.6K total profit from 2,760 hours at $122/hour across Place Card Me, SaaS Pegasus and Chat Stats — are unchanged. The material does not record the current operating state of the three products or Zue's present projects, so nothing further is claimed here.
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