Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

Forget about billion dollar ideas, I am not even interested in working on million dollar ideas. There are multiple ideas or projects which are left because they don't have potential to scale. They are very specific to a niche set of customers or teams. Many people wanted to work on the solution but dropped off as they had bigger fishes to fry or knew the idea wouldn't scale. But the idea would scale up to a certain limit.

e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/

I believe that every village needs to solve their own problem and and may be in a different way(based upon the resources they have) as the external help may not arrive. The solution also need not go to cities as it is very specific to the village. This man got a project working after passing the initial inertia. His company may not scale beyond a certain limit but I guess that's okay.

What do you think would be those kind of ideas?

My startup ideas :)

I've been designing and building audio software and hardware components for musicians since I was a teenager. VST plugins to start, then moved on to digital guitar effects and now Eurorack synth modules. I've also built custom midi controllers, traditional guitar pedals, you name it, I've designed and built it.

I have absolutely no doubt that I could build a small, semi-successful company around these products, that would turn over 200-300k per year, with a nice profit margin. In fact, I've made quite detailed business models which make me very confident in that.

My problem, however, is that I am extremely well employed (like probably many other readers here :) and that just won't compete with my current paycheck; which also comes with job security, low stress, and vacation days (I'm on the UK). These ideas would also be very difficult or impossible to grow into million dollar+ annual sales, as they are targeted at very niche audiences.

So I've been stuck in this half-way place, where I have a bunch of products, mostly finished, even polished (and I work on this stuff because I LOVE doing it, that's the only reason), and every time I have to make a decision whether to open source it and give it away or try to monetise it. So far, it's all gone the open source way, but I have a couple of projects I'm holding back because I think I might be able to sell them to another company for a decent amount.

Thinking about all those meta/alphabet/twitter employees being let go these days, I wouldn't be surprised if we're about to see an explosion in cool, scrappy tech startups, from people who've been in my situation, and decided to use this as an opportunity to build their little dream startup - I hope so!

I think the main direction of $$$K dollar ideas are those in the area of consulting, do those count? It can scale well beyond that, but at that point you're an agency.

I believe that coming up with product ideas that can work at the indie level (bootstrapped/without raising millions) is a matter of training, validating the idea is the hardest part (and not falling into the trap of building it first). The main target of those ideas is often something that can sustain you with under a hundred customers, which rules out building a new social network.

One idea I had recently is on the edge of consumers and businesses: it might make sense to have groupon-like websites for niches. These could be geographical, or around a certain activity. For instance if you are into craft beer, why not create a "deal" website for it? Call up shops that sell brewing equipment, walk in to local bars and ask if they would like to come up with some craft beer tasting event. The model is here that you get a kickback if people take you up on your offers. The more niche the better.. It could be as specific as "young parents who love craft beer and live in New York". That sounds like it could be in the 100k range.

A small plug, for fun I've been writing up some ideas that fit this description [0].

[0]: https://indieideas.substack.com/archive?sort=new

This space feels pretty crowded to me.

Out of interest, what makes you think there's still money left on the table in this domain, given all the existing products? Or rather, what do you feel all the existing products lack?

This is a problem that is so incredibly solved it has spawned a giant industry of SaaS providers preying on the fact that a lot of engineering managers don't really understand simplicity. Raking in the cash without doing much of anything.