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Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

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41–50 of 208 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#41

Work for somebody else. No startup stress. No need to take it home with you. Consistent schedule. You can easily clear $100k just keeping your head down in a big company.

No need to take it home with you. Consistent schedule This is not always guaranteed and you may not have a choice regarding this once you pass a certain stage in your career. It also depends on your industry and the part of the world you live and work in. Work life balance is notoriously non-existent for a vast portion of the world's IT workers.

What’s work life balance anyway? I don’t really want a job where I work for 8 hours (plus 1.5h getting up and ready for work, plus 1h break) and then have 4 hours of life in the evening.

I once had such a job and it was horrible: I worked as an amazon warehouse associate, basically just receiving packages, sorting items, putting a barcode with asin on it, done. Loop this for 8 hours plus some additional pressure from team leads.

In the evening I didn’t even have the energy left to have any kind of “life“; and I really hated that job, so it was even more exhausting and tiring.

Now I have a job which really fulfills me, and I don’t even see it as work anymore. I have no issue with staying late, and I actually want to stay late often in order to get my stuff done; also still working at home and researching stuff in my free time. But now I don’t really have this clear border what some call work-life balance.

My opinion might not be agreeable for everyone, but maybe this viewpoint helps someone else.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#42
There's always room at the bottom in logistics and scheduling. Find a local business that currently depends on guesswork, intuition and experience in managing their inventory or supplies or other shipments. Every bakery and independent pizza shop has point-of-sale software now, but how many have back-end software that reads the sales figures and can tell them to order [sugar, flour, cheese] before they run out? Even better if it looks back at previous years and suggests appropriate increases for holidays, school graduations and similar periodic events.

Once you've got the structure and interface right, start customizing according to requirements. Does a rural area run on delivered kerosene and propane? Schedule deliveries to customers according to the local temperatures and a per-client adjustment reflecting their historical usage.

Most of all, make it easy and obvious for your clients to use every day. Talk to them about their professional networks -- is there a forum or a mailing list where they discuss the business side? Get mentioned, get recommended. Be easy to talk to.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#44
post #9
post #6

Uptime monitoring (imho as founder of OnlineOrNot)

This is a problem that is so incredibly solved it has spawned a giant industry of SaaS providers preying on the fact that a lot of engineering managers don't really understand simplicity. Raking in the cash without doing much of anything.

> a lot of engineering managers don't really understand simplicity

What’s this alluding to?

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#45
10k idea at best:

I am the creator of 2bored2wait [0], a proxy that does stuff that is useful if you are a regular player on the minecraft server 2b2t.org. the current implementation is buggy, slow, in javascript and has a lot of tech debt.

An interesting fact about 2b2t is that because it is an anarchy server, it has not rules against using cheats and players won't get banned for using them. This means that there is a subset of players with too much money that likes to spend it on some flavor of paid hacked clients, some with monthly subscription.

I think there is a business somewhere to rewrite 2bored2wait in a faster language, integrate it well in a hacked client and/or as a service and sell that for a monthly fee or whatever, but i haven't even had the drive to do it for the sake of open source, even less so for creating a saas product that at most 100 people would use.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#46
post #42

There's always room at the bottom in logistics and scheduling. Find a local business that currently depends on guesswork, intuition and experience in managing their inventory or supplies or other shipments. Every bakery and independent pizza shop has point-of-sale software now, but how many have back-end software that reads the sales figures and can tell them to order [sugar, flour, cheese] before they run out? Even…

Excellent suggestion. I'm doing exactly this now for a one-off client in consumer packaged goods and I'd like to productize this service.

If anybody non-technical is interested in partnering with me (technical) on this, my forwarding email's in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#47

Not looking to promote my site here but I will do it anyway because it may be useful for you: https://microfounder.com There are currently 200 founders making $1.6M per month with their solo startups.

In response to someone who is explicitly uninterested in billion and million dollars ideas, you share a site about people making roughly 20 million a year?

I’m not singling you out, since this happens allllllll the time, but I truly wish you or anyone could articulate why you thought it would be helpful to share something that was by definition unhelpful or “off topic”.

Truly breaks my brain trying to fathom this behavior.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#48
Things that have to do with code, but not product, that uniquely qualify your existence are your 6 figure ideas. Examples:

* Architecture - Most people writing code cannot plan, write, or envision an original solution to something wildly ambitious. This takes practice and with enough practice it gets comfortable and easy, but most people writing code will never get to that point. A mastery of architecture is possibly the only way to produce a superior product compared to the competition provided that business requirements remain unchanged.

* Performance - Astonishingly most people never measure anything unless they are forced to. Learning to measure things (everything) is a cognitive skill and the result is the difference between a 2 hour work day and an 8 hour work day. Measuring things is also the only way to write fast software, because everything else is guessing (and probably guessing wrong by several orders of magnitude). At the end of the day performance is not about how fast something this, but how much faster it is than something else.

* Writing, especially bridging the gap between technical writing and narrative writing for common people.

Re: Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?

#50

Not looking to promote my site here but I will do it anyway because it may be useful for you: https://microfounder.com There are currently 200 founders making $1.6M per month with their solo startups.

In response to someone who is explicitly uninterested in billion and million dollars ideas, you share a site about people making roughly 20 million a year? I’m not singling you out, since this happens allllllll the time, but I truly wish you or anyone could articulate why you thought it would be helpful to share something that was by definition unhelpful or “off topic”. Truly breaks my brain trying to fathom this beh…

Sorry, I should have said collectively. 200 devs are making collectively $1.6M per month (most doing < $5k/mo)
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