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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?

#41

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

ronilan wrote: post #20
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…

You use “the world is full” twice. First to describe the high supply of software developers looking for projects and second to describe the high demand for said services. So why hasn’t supply met demand? Why isn’t the market working more efficiently? There can be various explanations for that, obviously, including the lack of information you hint at ( “secret” , “have no idea” ), but Occam's Razor would suggest we ex…

Well I will doubt the supply side. I think it's a simpler assertion, because I know so few nerds.

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

#42

Post by analog31 »

In my view, some possible sources of ideas are sports and hobbies. People will often spend money on something that might improve their enjoyment of those activities. You're tapping into a different budget than the usual business clients, and if it's a non-tech hobby, it's not already flooded with people who can develop and execute solutions.

I hit on a solution to a problem while engaged on web forums related to my hobby. Now I sell a little gadget on the side. The people on the forum, with whom I was already on good terms, provided my initial sales and word-of-mouth.

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

#43

Post by vilaca »

halfjoking wrote: post #8

The quickest way to build an impressive SaaS project in 2019: 1. Find a cool machine learning project with preferably pre-trained models so you don't have to do much cleaning/moving data. 2. Get those models doing inference on a server and expose it as an API. 3. ??? (marketing/sales/business stuff) 4. Profit

you lost me at 3.

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

#44

Post by mrfusion »

halfjoking wrote: post #8

The quickest way to build an impressive SaaS project in 2019: 1. Find a cool machine learning project with preferably pre-trained models so you don't have to do much cleaning/moving data. 2. Get those models doing inference on a server and expose it as an API. 3. ??? (marketing/sales/business stuff) 4. Profit

Any examples?

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

#45

Post by LyndsySimon »

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…

IntelliJ is a JetBrains product - I'd be interested in what their revenue breakdown is between "corporate" and "individual" licenses, but I suspect that there are more individuals paying for it than you'd think.

I know I have an active subscription still for PyCharm, even though I've not used it personally since moving to vim full-time a couple of years ago. It's a great product, and I find it extremely useful when teaching people new to Python - the autocomplete is excellent, and there are visualization tools that I've not found a good replacement for.

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

#46

Post by cdiamand »

I send out a daily newsletter with short snippets of pain points in different industries - http://www.oppsdaily.com

Here is archive of sorts - http://www.oppslist.com

The ideas are of a mediocre quality, but I find they help stimulate thought.

Another idea is to go to a place like Fiverr and look at which services are most widely bought. Then build a saas solving one of those problems.

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

#48

Post by LyndsySimon »

bargl wrote: post #26

My best idea to help came from when I was working at a Auto Body shop and I was able to help them optimize their books. They used to dread doing a simple export from Excel into a Tax software system (I forget which one) but I converted it to some weird proprietary format and they could import it. It's not what I'd (personally) start a startup on, but the idea is there. I was also super green and coding in VB so I'm g…

The problem with this is scaling - I've done similar things, but never invested the time necessary to wrap it in a nice UI and monetize it. The degree of customization necessary for each customer usually ends up being pretty high.

My project that comes to mind is when I helped a NAPA parts store retrofit a new cash register into their inventory system. Their inventory system was running on AS/400, and their old register that failed was a beast that let them enter a part number for each item, then communicated with the AS/400 over a proprietary protocol to get the price. When the transaction was completed it decremented the stock. It took me about sixty hours to reverse engineer the protocol from the failed register, then another forty or so to write a Python web service that communicated with it and exposed an API and ran their dot-matrix receipt printer. I farmed out creating a web UI to someone on Upwork and left them with a documented solution that let them use off-the-shelf hardware to talk to a small server that then spoke AS/400. I've since replaced the server with a Raspberry Pi, but otherwise it's been in place since 2003. The front-end was originally a touch-screen Windows CE client I snagged at a freight auction, and the last time I stopped by (a couple of years ago) they'd replaced that with an Android tablet on a pedestal and another tablet that they could carry around.

That sort of thing obviously has value to a lot of businesses, but each one is going to have a unique setup. There probably aren't a lot of parts houses out there that bought that particular vendor's inventory system in the 80s/90s, haven't upgraded, want to keep using the same backend, and are willing to upgrade their registers to something modern. I'd go so far as to say it's probably a unique situation.

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

#49

Post by justboxing »

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.

Wow, didn't know about this site. Thanks for the referral. 1kprojects.com seems to have a better list of active projects than sideprojectors.com , which is the only site I know of where people sell or barter side projects.

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

#50

Post by egypturnash »

ronilan wrote: post #20
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…

You use “the world is full” twice. First to describe the high supply of software developers looking for projects and second to describe the high demand for said services. So why hasn’t supply met demand? Why isn’t the market working more efficiently? There can be various explanations for that, obviously, including the lack of information you hint at ( “secret” , “have no idea” ), but Occam's Razor would suggest we ex…

Lots of things are worth applying some automation to, but not worth enough to pay someone to provide as a service.
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