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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?

#131

Post by muzani »

One approach is to find something badly done and do it well. My first successful startup was an app that had 20k downloads, with a Facebook community of 200k members, all very active. The creator of the app wasn't focused on making it a startup; they just showcased a minimum effort HTML5 app. I created a nice proper app, and did some e-commerce around the theme (healthy food).

A second approach is to travel. You'd be surprised how different things are in other countries. I got the idea of selling coffee from Australia, where great coffee is common and Starbucks was "tourist level". Australia also has a lot of mental health apps, which I'm working on now.

My first app was also heavily localised for non-urban Malaysians. There are plenty of keto recipe alternatives for Western food e.g. bacon and eggs. But Malaysia it's a lot harder because the culture is heavily rice based, so a keto recipe app is much more valuable.

So, you can also do subsets of a problem. Like Facebook and Harvard, Amazon and books, Apple and MP3 players.

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

#132

Post by thakobyan »

bbx wrote: post #109
thakobyan wrote: post #101

I was in a similar situation as you except I have a full-time job. I started https://cronhub.io a year ago and it's currently a profitable side-business. You don't need to focus on the idea too much. I think it's important but seeing other companies solving the same problem should not discourage you to come up with your own solution. Take a look at these products for inspiration ( https://www.indiehackers.com/product…

Thanks for using Bulma ;-)

Thanks for making it :)

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by icebraining »

modeless wrote: post #12

> I have read books and blogs suggesting that the best problem is the one that I have faced before. I agree with this advice, but my problem is that most problems I have faced are software development problems. I have tons of great ideas for software development tools that would be super cool. However, there is no market for selling software development tools, because everyone is used to getting them for free from op…

Our tools suck because there is no strong profit motive to produce improved tools.

Is it? From my experienced with tools from other industries where there is no subsidization of FOSS alternatives, I wouldn't say they suck any less, would you?

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

#136

Post by muzani »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #114
muzani wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key word: product market fit The product has to be good enough to solve the problems of the market. #2 is also a downside of this - you can't dump marketing money to get around PMF. Facebook is an interesting company which had a poor market (people are fine without it) but they managed to improve the product, the economics, the scale, just enough, and ended up one of the biggest companies in the world.

But, we're in established markets now. People have been using FB and many other sites for many years now and those behaviors are very much ingrained in people. There are only so many hours in a day someone can be online, so to some degree all new applications are competing with FB and the other incumbent apps. It's much much harder today than 10 or 15 years ago.

Established markets still need PMF. And existing sites/apps can lose their PMF.

There's a large demand for, say, a more privacy based social networking website. Or a gaming based social networking site, like what FB-Zynga used to be.

Google has a large blind spot too. Yelp is filling one, Pinterest covers their image search weakness, tons of travel apps/sites are filling another. But there's many, many things that can be more localized or made into a niche.

I'm not sure if it is harder, as technology has significantly improved. I think we're at the stage where less of the effort is building/designing an app, and more of it is in better product development.

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

#137

Post by opportune »

mittermayr wrote: post #34

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 inst…

There are actually pretty straightforward reasons why it's not necessarily optimal to be first-to-market. Someone else has already tons of research into product-market fit and made mistakes along the way that you can emulate and learn from respectively. They've also jump started demand in the market for a similar product that perhaps has different features/quality/pricing

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

#138

Post by Smithalicious »

Find something that you know is profitable and do a better job at it. Ignore any intuition that says that you could never compete with an existing service and that it would be better to come up with an original idea; not only are original ideas very hard to come by, but most ideas are also just bad.

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

#139

Post by Smithalicious »

bitL wrote: post #58
mrfusion wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any examples?

Stock/Forex predictions with multiple ML models where clients could choose which ones they would like to follow. Bonus $ for showing them the best performing model for their portfolio etc. With a simple PWA app and UI and some scalable AWS/lambda instances to handle the load and a couple of instances to keep training/predictions set going.

I feel like machine learning is to the stock exchange like regular expressions are to html: everyone who learns about the first will at some point think them to be useful for dealing with the latter.

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

#140

Post by jamesmontalvo3 »

kaybe wrote: post #125
rustyboy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I still remember this guy: > I work at NASA creating procedures for spacewalks (EVAs). > Currently we write these procedures in Microsoft Word. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 (2013) Hm, I wonder if they changed the system by now? edit: Seems like there was still work to be done 3 years ago at least.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 (2016)

Nope, we're still using the same system. Wow...the first time I mentioned that here was 2013. Ouch. It's something I've wanted to work on all this time but just haven't been able to fit it in. Some students used it as a group project [1] last semester, though, and another group of students may pick it up this semester...so I'm hopeful.

[1] https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk

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