Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

Honestly I would put ads on the extractemailaddress.com website and work on improving it's position on the search results. In addition to that localization to one or two other languages would probably be nice to boost the views. That "make a small donation" button really put me off.

Market research takes time and effort, just like programming does. If you do not already have an idea you know will make you money, you will need to put in the time and effort to find one instead of using that time making random websites. Some people do get lucky and find a niche without much effort, but that is likely not the case for most.

Writing code and starting a business are different activities. You need to learn how to start a business, figure out what product you want to build, find out what market you want to target, merge the product and market to get a product/market fit. Then figure out selling/marketing/funding and all the rest.

Ideas are actually the easiest thing, execution is the hardest.

You might not want a startup but a small business that can make more than you currently make, then head over to indiehackers.com

You can do it. Have you considered partnering up with someone else? It's really hard to go at it alone. Not impossible, but really tough.

This sounds to me like you are looking at the "skin" of what other people do and trying to replicate that instead of digging into the guts behind why their thing was successful.

I talk a lot with my sons about how dragons in fiction are "the red dragon" and "the blue dragon" and "the green dragon" etc. And maybe the red dragon breathes fire and the blue dragon breathes ice and the green dragon breathes acid, but they all look essentially identical except for the color, like you took a stamp and stamped out three dragons and colored them all differently with crayons.

In reality, if you have three species that are that fundamentally different in function, they will look vastly different. It won't be the same body, but with different skin.

You can see this readily in nature. Penguins are birds. But they are birds that don't fly, live in a very cold climate and swim. They look vastly different from most birds that live in warmer climates and fly instead of swimming.

So, no, it isn't sufficient to replicate the "skin" of a successful business. You need to do research and find out what the hidden parts are that make it actually work. This is sometimes called "the secret sauce."

No matter how much public data is available about a business, there will be things the public doesn't know -- The working guts of the business that happens behind the scenes. This is what you appear to be missing.

In my thirties, I was doing similar things. I was pursuing the trappings of a business without actually accomplishing anything.

The crux of all business is you need paying customers. You need to figure out a thing of value that people will pay you for. If you can't figure that out, the trappings aren't going to do anything. If you have that, layering on some trappings of business can improve things.

But you have to have that piece first and foremost. And from where I sit, you don't seem to be doing that piece.