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Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

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Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#181

Post by gremlinsinc »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #174
ageitgey wrote: post #6

The world is full of people in your situation who's main area of interest and experience is primarily in software development or start-ups. Because of this, almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times. There's tons of competition even for really bad ideas - just look at how many start-ups in SF tried to offer "laundry as a service"! The secret is to go out and make frie…

Not that I want to be anti-innovation, but what if spreadsheets allow the user to be more in control, have more flexibility and avoid monthly payments of 3-5 cloud services? Maybe replacing every spreadsheet is not optimal.

Airtables is a good example, though -- I'm seriously thinking of creating an OSS version of Airtables, that has more field types -- like being able to edit using Markdown... or join across bases, not just tables.. There's SO much more you could do w/ their tech, and blocks should be free - just they should have a marketplace and take a cut of sales--something like shopify... if I OSS'd it, I'd do some hybrid like wordpress does, but require a % on anything in the 'app store' -- but all core features would be free / foss.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#182

Post by pizza »

milesvp wrote: post #148
paulgb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume you still use YouTube An aside, but funny enough, one thing I like about DDG is how much better it is at finding YouTube videos. I assume Google is encumbered by antitrust fears or something when it comes to video search.

I’m not sure it’s a complete aside. What you’re describing is the general recipe that business school warns against for entrenched industries. That is to say, if you give up low margin products, you give an inroad for competitors to gain competancy and scale. Rebar in the steel industry is sort of the hallmark example. Even though search is still an important part of their ad income, I don’t see google’s dominance in…

When you put it like that, suddenly it starts to make a lot more sense to me why Google seemingly relinquishes projects to their graveyard; they probably have a lot of competitors for each abandoned project that do the same thing as well, or better. It would be nice if Google had a default policy of allowing exports of stored data to said competitors, though..

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#183

Post by RickS »

jonnyrockit wrote: post #151
RickS wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the extent you're willing to comment, I'd be interested in knowing about your criteria for selecting such a project. - was the domain related to your expertise, or in a niche that was new to you? - what made this project stand out from others / appear to have potential? - was codebase quality a factor in purchase? - do you inherit things other than software from the seller? EG customers, marketing channels, analyt…

To answer your questions: - Yes, the domain area was something that I was interested in already, but not necessarily practised. - Quite honest, I chose it purely on price and the design of the items bought. The dev put in effort to get everything designed nicely. - No, not at the time. It was a rails project so quality was not considered since its too easy to add on/rewrite where needed - Got customer lists, source c…

Thank you very much for your answer! Both the most predictable and the most interesting thing IMO is the factor of your existing network in the success of the product. More and more I'm seeing the compound returns of network reach in the careers of my peers who have spent their entire lives working with large teams/customer bases. If I had to restart my career today, I would spend the first 5-10 years in enterprise and then go startup, instead of the reverse.

Wishing you the best – really great to have an income stream like that, buying you room to make even more successful bets.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#184

Post by JCharante »

balls187 wrote: post #85
ageitgey wrote: post #6

The world is full of people in your situation who's main area of interest and experience is primarily in software development or start-ups. Because of this, almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times. There's tons of competition even for really bad ideas - just look at how many start-ups in SF tried to offer "laundry as a service"! The secret is to go out and make frie…

> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. I'd slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries. Having a good idea is only the first step. You need to be able to market it, and ultimately sell it. Business owners face business problems, will have an idea on how much they're willing to spend on it, and…

Thanks for sharing your experience, that sounds awesome!

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#185

Post by ElijahLynn »

jonnyrockit wrote: post #150
ElijahLynn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify since you are responding like you authored the original post. Are you also the `johnnyrockit` account and just signed in under `gketuma`?

No, that's not me

Thanks, so it seems like a spam comment trying to get people to buy their app, using your comment as fuel.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#186

Post by verulito »

hogu wrote: post #93

I know this sounds dumb, but I found this to be very useful https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becomi... It's an entertaining read, but the premise is - idea generation is a skill - you need to practice - come up with 10 garbage ideas per day (and occasionally one or two are good)

this!

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#189

Post by achempion »

I think no one can tell you what to do if you want to make a profitable enterprise from it. My hypothesis is you can earn from any thing if you are willing to put enough effort.

The way to not stop working on idea is to choose something you really care about and what can motivate you to pursue your goal even if you can't see any returns from it.

For me it was a pain to learn English and to remember all new fancy words I met reading books. As I'm a software engineer my software standards are quite hight and it was hard to find what I want, so I had decided to build my own solution (https://vocab10k.com). Also, you can pick any stack you want :)

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#190

Post by krschacht »

Find a popular service (Salesforce, Wufoo, Asana, Xero, Gmail, etc) and scour the forums for things people repeatedly request to be added. Pick a popular request that you have reason to believe won’t be added as a feature soon (e.g. company said so, it’s been years of waiting, it’s outside of obvious product expansion, etc). Go build it as an add-on (chrome extension, api, etc). Market it on the forums. You can even reach out to people and ask in advance if they would pay. Show them screenshot mockups and state a price.
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