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Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

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141–150 of 214 posts

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

#141
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I switched successfully to duckduckgo...

Fair enough, but Google has made their mission about making the world's information accessible, moreso than being the best search engine; I assume you still use YouTube, perhaps you use Google Maps (although there are plenty of good navigation alternatives), perhaps you use Google Translate, etc.

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

#142

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.

> which is the only site I know of where people sell or barter side projects.

I'm a bit surprised you haven't heard about this one: https://flippa.com

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

#143
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen more success from freelancers -> very profitable side projects than any other form. It makes sense: you're being paid real money to provide a custom solution to a problem, so if you can make a generalizable version of that solution you can at least feel confident that you're solving a problem people will throw money at to fix. The most common thing I've seen is that freelancers will (as the situation call…

All freelancers should learn how to quickly assemble a simple SaaS (e.g. Bootstrap + Flask + Stripe) and then quickly implement a version of whatever they were doing in their paid projects (making sure it's legal ofc) and expose it as an SaaS using their SaaS template. They can even form a separate Delaware LLC for each of them, once the SaaS is built they can just try to sell it; lots of money there as well as not m…

The "Stripe Delaware LLC" scheme comes with quite a few pitfalls: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870886

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

#144
post #94
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that one too when I browsed 1k a few days back. It advertised that it was already making money. Congrats on your purchase,

That's not the OP, but yeah, I saw it as well. It made me wish that 1k had a "sort by MRR" option. MRR is a very loud positive signal. edit: and since it's from another HN'r, good work! It's a good idea with a really tasteful/simple execution.

Mrr?

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

#145

Here are two ideas for desktop apps that I think would be worthwhile: 1) A data copy app. I often need to copy data from one place to another (eg. copy data from MS Access to a MySQL server, export data from PostgreSQL to CSV, fetch data from some REST API and insert it into PostgreSQL). There tools for some of those jobs (eg. CSV import / export from PostgreSQL is solved). But there are a lot of jobs where I end up…

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

#146
post #116
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the one I don’t think. It was listed on 1k projects 3 days agp for $950. And that’s not OP posting.

https://1kprojects.com/project/arthur It is not?!

Well, probably not. OP said they make half their monthly salary from it. That site makes $300. Maybe OP is in a poorer country and makes $600 as a software engineer, and uses a Mac.

They did post about it three years ago, so it seems linked to them. But I'd wait for OP to confirm: the person posting is not OP and may just be guessing based on OP's post history and having searched 1k projects.

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

#147

> 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…

I'm sure there's an argument where, on a personal level, releasing software open source can lead to financial gain by opening up opportunities to new jobs, fame, etc. It's good resume material, especially if the scope is smaller. For an extreme case, it worked for Linus

There's also the infamous Brew developer and Google's interview for a counterexample. But that's more of a devil's advocate thing.

I think your point still stands, but instead of Linus I'd use the more relevant Mike Perham and his Sidekiq tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925449

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

#148
post #95
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but Google has made their mission about making the world's information accessible, moreso than being the best search engine; I assume you still use YouTube, perhaps you use Google Maps (although there are plenty of good navigation alternatives), perhaps you use Google Translate, etc.

> 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 search lasting another 100 years, since there will continue to be smaller competitors who excell in some small low margin area and it will slowly chip away at their brand.

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

#149

Chart library for JavaScript that is: - Well documented - Dev friendly - High performant - Framework-agnostic - Written in modern JavaScript and well architected so it can be tree-shaked and prevent a huge bundle size - TypeScript support - Well priced - Open source The only decent one that I could find is https://github.com/amcharts/amcharts4 but is lacking from good tree-shaking support and performance

Highcharts too? I checked if they had tree shaking, but apparently not https://github.com/highcharts/highcharts/issues/8667

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

#150
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://arthur-osx.com/

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
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