61–70 of 219 posts
https://neocities.org I was looking at my old personal web sites after working on a different startup and really felt sad about how gross social media was getting, and how money focused the web was becoming. I wanted to see creative and interesting personal websites again outside of the context of a museum. So I coded up a prototype and, turns out I wasn't the only one interested in that. HN readers did the first boo…
For me, it started by working for a company that was incapable of keeping their graphql service online, so I built an uptime monitoring service for graphql, and eventually generalised it to work for all APIs and web apps.
How did I do it? Just consistent effort over a long time.
I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.
I currently make 100% of my family's income from side projects that expanded into full time gigs. A lot of people will answer "solve a real-world problem and alleviate your customers' pain points", but I've seen so many people interpret this in the most bizarre ways possible, go down ridiculously dumb paths and fall flat on their arse. To be brutally honest, if you're asking how to find a product idea on HN, I don't…
I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back. Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you. Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot. Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise yo…
I make several thousands of dollars a year there even though recently I've had to take some extended time away due to my wife's health and newborn son.
I thought I would run out of ideas for videos but putting stuff out there sparks new ideas and once it got going it's been an enjoyable process that I look forward to returning to.
I currently make 100% of my family's income from side projects that expanded into full time gigs. A lot of people will answer "solve a real-world problem and alleviate your customers' pain points", but I've seen so many people interpret this in the most bizarre ways possible, go down ridiculously dumb paths and fall flat on their arse. To be brutally honest, if you're asking how to find a product idea on HN, I don't…
Not sure if that was your intent but I just want to make it crystal clear that that's completely untrue.
Building good businesses and identifying profitable ideas is a skill that can be learned.
> Good business ideas jump out at you screaming
Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.
YC has an excellent video on this that's out just recently (from SUS 2022): How to get and evaluate startup ideas[0] There are a lot of different ways to think about this -- but generally what seems to be the pattern is: - Get in a problem-finding mindset (generate value by solving problems). Problems are absolutely everywhere in society - Qualifying problems is more important than having them (is this a problem peop…
I like how you commercialize it. Those ads are so relevant I went through some posts just for them and found 2 podcasts I think I'll enjoy.
Started making simple games in college, later started making simple apps and games. Figured out ways to monetize them later. Most of the money comes from a small niche users for app / small number of regular players for games. So basically I build stuff for fun and later pivoted a bit to monetize them, like adding extra features or selling ad space.
A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com We started with a simple web scraping solution for real estate market that was up and running in just a couple of days. We used it to track prices of apartments in our area aggregated across multiple websites. Then, as we saw value in this, we expanded data scraping to other cities and types of properties and released the product to external users. We had a few paying cust…
When you say "4G proxies", are these devices that route their traffic over 4G connections via the mobile network? So you are using the IP ranges of telecommunications companies rather than clouds?
Also, how do you protect against customers doing illegal things with the IP's that are assigned to your business?
I try to optimize for what is enjoyable. Making and using the thing, whatever it is should be fun. The reason is, bringing a product to market involves so much drudgery and success is so unlikely — you might as well have a good time. Enjoyment will also keep you at it for longer, which can make a huge difference. I won’t pretend my project [0] is sustaining me financially. But i’m still going after 3-4 years and I st…
For me I would also add "usefulness" as requirement or like you say it has to be still "worth it" (commercially or learning stuff etc).
I had several side projects for years, but various realistic evaluations (competition, market size, production maturity, progress) then led me to the conclusion that I had to stop as they got less useful for me. But stopping them is very tricky when you "enjoy" them :)