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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?

#31

Post by RickS »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #21
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…

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

100%.

Google wasn't the first search engine. But they were effectively the last. First to market is only important insofar as it's correlated with making sticky products, building a moat, and not dying. That's what you actually want.

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

#32

Post by Xolo »

Let dissect this a little,

1. List 3-5 things that you enjoy doing routinely 2. Now imagine how you can improve some of its aspects 3. What would that ideal world look like? 4. Everything can be improved!

Mine - Meditation - When I was starting guided meditation options were limited, still are to an extent. Some are expensive and some are limited with options. It does not have to be a solo journey like mine and many others' were. If I did not have anything to work on I'd create a database of guided meditation tools resources, there are 1000's on youtube. I'd categorise them by mood, skills-level etc... Have a basic social aspect to it by adding a community that share the passion and I then can introduce paid features such as Journaling etc. By leveraging the free database of contents out there one would have a decent competitive advantage. Just a thought...

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

#33

Post by RickS »

jonnyrockit wrote: post #30

I was lucky and found a small little gem on 1kprojects.com that turned itself into a nice little profitable side-project in 5 weeks (not linking to it because i don't want to seem like I'm advertising). Making half my monthly salary at my day job from it. Sometimes it's just the simplest, least technical and gimmicky things that make money.

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, analytics, etc?

- what was the value-add that made it work under your stewardship but not the seller's Sales / marketing / dev / featureset / etc

- Are you interested in doing this repeatedly?

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

#34

Post by mittermayr »

Don't throw away an idea because someone else has already made it. This is crucial. People completely underestimate the amount of money you can make as a runner-up, or even as a 5th or 10th-place service in some markets. Most of the products I'm involved with have made me quite substantial amounts over the years compared to the minimal time required to upkeep them. There's at least ten companies I can name at an instant that do almost exactly the same, yet I still make money doing the very same thing. Appreciate the invaluable advantage a market-proven idea brings and focus on whatever its target audience lacks or loves most about the most-popular offering. It doesn't mean you have to copy something (where's the fun in that), but consider this if you start working on something and then come across someone who's done the exact same thing with good success. Don't give up, use it.

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

#35

Post by tiuPapa »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #21
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…

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

I think there is also a C) You might just be lucky when the other guys weren't. Sometimes, luck is as much a factor as hard work.

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

#36

Post by simmanian »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #21
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…

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

I don't think it's defeatism because what GP seems to point out is OP needs to expand his experience pool to see the low hanging fruits that reside outside of the software world.

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

#37

Post by stevenwliao »

modeless wrote: post #22
stevenwliao wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies are happy to pay for IntelliJ, Docker, and GitHub. I think it depends on which tools you choose to build.

GitHub is a good example of a software development tool that is a cloud service instead of a local program, and thus has an easy and effective monetization strategy. Still, though, the vast majority use it for free. IntelliJ and Docker give most of their products away for free. Why? Probably mostly because there is no good solution to licensing local software. They rely on the patronage of a relative few corporations…

Is there a market to sell these to funded startups or do most of them cut corners here too?

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

#39

Post by rustyboy »

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.

Great advice, my SO works outdoors doing field studies and the amount of shit they talk about doing manually is astounding. They pay people (or sometimes unpaid interns) to go through hours of videos documenting everything they see! Almost all cataloging and measurements are done with little to no technology. Another example; I volunteer for a program that does some human intake and processing, before I got there everyone used a series of paper forms that got updated by work of mouth. Now? Google Spreadsheets.

There's hundreds of industries, organizations, and groups that do extremely manual labor intensive work because it hasn't even occurred to them it can be automated or turned in to a service, but you'll never meet them if you hang around tech people all the time because the solution is always on their mind.

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