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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?

#171
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Monthly Recurring Revenue. It's the simplest metric for a subscription based service or SaaS.

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

#172

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.

I checked out your project and it looks pretty good, I like the fact that ideas also have an estimated value attached to them. Would you mind if I included some of your ideas in my own project - Idea Miner ( https://ideaminr.com )? Of course, I will mention the source.

Interestingly, I think there is a market for this. Maybe not as big as Product Hunt, but has a market for all potential builders to build something new.

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

#173
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…

"I had a network locally that I knew I could sell to"

I suspect this is the key to success in most smaller startups. Instead of focusing on getting 0.01% of a global market go for 10% of very local/focused market.

A prepopulated sales channel goes a long way.

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

#174
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.

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

#175
I suppose that finding problems is not difficult. The most difficult is to find an audience that has the same problem and sell your product. As Lead Startup Methodology tells us that we need to check our hypotheses after that create a solution. A lot of startups die because founders don't catch an audience.

And if you create a solution, it doesn't mean that you will get revenues so fast. The best choice is to find a remote/local job at startups. If you're in London, I think it's not a big deal.

Or just having some projects on side. You will earn more incomes than you can do with a startup.

I use for searching projects Periodix [1] and Facebook groups. There are a lot of projects of startups. ALso, I saw the website that oriented on Positive Impact Projects Jobs [2]

1 - https://periodix.net/ 2 - https://positiveimpacttechjobs.com/ 3 - List of Remote Jobs in Different Companies https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sr0vy3eDn2fcEhxOdkPv...

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

#176
Talk to your parents and their friends about their work, especially if they run small businesses, and what they wish they could do on their phones/tablets, or were easier to do in Excel. If nothing else, it will improve your customer-facing and requirements-gathering skills while broadening your understanding of non-startup businesses.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who would pay for that? I can’t imagine there’s much demand for an app to remove image backgrounds?

they’re selling API access, so someone who needs to do this en masse, eg if you had an app that needs avatars with a clear face pic, dating apps, etc. Perhaps researchers looking to analyse facial features who want to skip this step, law enforcement looking to clean up a bunch of selfies, media/tv companies building copy for ads, a photoshop plugin builder etc. Building your own deep learning model is expensive and r…

you still need to run that tensorflow model on a monster server to see performance - no ? That can be quite expensive.

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

#178

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.

I checked out your project and it looks pretty good, I like the fact that ideas also have an estimated value attached to them. Would you mind if I included some of your ideas in my own project - Idea Miner ( https://ideaminr.com )? Of course, I will mention the source.

very cool but my eyes!

How can someone follow this list? I'd be interested in following and possibly knowing which are new when I come back.

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

#179
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…

This is horrible advice. You're positing that there is no room for innovation within the software development domain. This is a stupid assertion.

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

#180
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…

Is this just your "reasonable sounding opinion" or have you yourself had any success in doing what the OP is asking about? Or are you yourself sitting in a comfortable office job in "business and industry"?

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs.

Why assume that changing this hasn't been "attempted 10 times"? Perhaps the reason for that is simply opaque to you and as a software developer you think in terms of software solutions. However, getting these solutions sold is the real problem.

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