If you want profitable you need two things:
- Strong margins - Big market
Only then will you be able to afford to get your offering in front of the customers who might buy it.
Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
191–200 of 214 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#192Let me tell you what usually doesn't work unless you have excellent non-tech skills: having an awesome idea and coding it to perfection and launching it. I tried this many times and failed because I didn't polish it with the right marketing and didn't interview potential clients and all these things developers don't do.
In other words you need a co-founder and this is the trickiest part of all. Where and how to find him/her how to motivate when they usually have high paying jobs etc
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#193> 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... Oh, quite the opposite I'd say. Because we are software developers, and we can fix our problems with software, we accumulated quite a rich toolbox to solve our problems better. We're quick to dismiss our ecosystem (everything sucks/is broken), I tend to enjoy such conversations as well, and sure, there are plenty of broken/unfinished things out there, but in all honesty: what other subcult…
> Linux kernel
Wouldn't it actually be a good example of "whatever big companies see fit to subsidize in their open source programs"?
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fixed the color scheme. For sites like ProductHunt and BetaList the information is updated daily, for sites with less activity such as IndieHackers the information can be a few days old. For now you can bookmark the website and check it out daily until I add some social media, a newsletter and all of that stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#195I did a joke side project that encouraged users to pay $1 for a ridiculous startup idea ("Uber for firemen" or "Disrupt the cat grooming industry")
It made me $25 - but gave me the next idea. It had turned out to be more annoying than I imagined to put a payment button on a website (unless I wanted to use PayPal. I didn't - I use Stripe).
Without running a back-end, like an ecommerce app or a home-rolled Heroku app or something - for token exchange, you can't use Stripe. I don't mind building that kind of thing, but I figured other people must.
So I built Trolley [1] - it's a popup payments widget / cart, using Stripe, that works just by pasting in a snippet of HTML.
4 months later and I've got a few hundred users, I've started marketing it specifically to JAMstack and static site people, and I'm enjoying making it, very much.
[1] - https://trolley.link
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#196You'd be surprised how many problems are 'solved' but only barely. I use software that I hear people complain about every day. They have pretty sales webpages but the software itself is buggy, slow, hard to use, and support is unresponsive. Just make something 10% better and you would make a killing. I'm avoiding mentioning a product or category not just to avoid throwing someone under the bus, but because I can thin…
Would you be willing to give a few examples of such products if I messaged you separately?
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#197The 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.
I agree with this, but I'd add one more point. In addition to face-to-face time with these people (which can be hard to come by, either on your end or on theirs), you can try to learn about other industries by reading their books, whitepapers, journals, etc., watching their videos, documentaries, etc., and following industry trade magazines, analyst reports, and the like. This stuff you can at least do on your own time, late at night or on the weekends, whenever you have time to spare.
Given this kind of research, you can put together a tentative "value hypothesis" regarding a potential solution in some other space. Then you can maximize the value of your face-to-face time with other people by talking through a specific hypothesis, instead of just an open-ended fishing expedition.
Of course, if somebody is willing to give you a half day of their time, and you have that half day free, then go for it. But generally, people are more open to sharing their time if you can make it clear that you respect their time and that the interaction will be somewhat directed / focused.
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#198The 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…
Ha! I did a webapp just for tagging observation videos. This is for my SO college students, they were doing it in excel. It's a big headache for maintenance, but it probably saved her students alot of time
There are niche apps that do it but they charge a high fee to the college. Case you are wondering:
Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our tools suck because... Oh, quite the opposite I'd say. Because we are software developers, and we can fix our problems with software, we accumulated quite a rich toolbox to solve our problems better. We're quick to dismiss our ecosystem (everything sucks/is broken), I tend to enjoy such conversations as well, and sure, there are plenty of broken/unfinished things out there, but in all honesty: what other subcult…
> Linux kernel Wouldn't it actually be a good example of "whatever big companies see fit to subsidize in their open source programs"?
True, at least for modern kernel development. But I'm also not really arguing against that, I'm arguing against the notion that this model of development (open source combined with corporate sponsorship) is responsible for a lack of resources which causes our tools to suck. Or even that our tools suck in the first place, taking into account the complexity and non-linearity of the systems we build. Our tools work really well, considering, and it might even be the reason why software eats the world right now.