An invoice passed over my desk one day many years ago that charged us 30% to get some money back. Started to investigate it and found that there was an opportunity.
Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
71–80 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#72My father asked me to create Windows apps for the hospital department where he worked as a doctor (calculating drug dosages and the nutritional needs of preterm infants). I figured that there might be others with a similar need and eventually created a SaaS app builder that is currently my full-time job. It's been almost 20 years since that original request. https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2018/04/09/launching-after-15-…
Yet another proof that no 1 value that an entrepreneur should have is dedication. Congrats!
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#73I run Buttondown ( http://buttondown.email/ ) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year. My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that: 1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor, 2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements; 3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipp…
How did you market this and get traction?
This may be an unsatisfying answer: slowly.
I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no 'big bang' where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.
This is a strong _advantage_ of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017—2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn't drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn't going viral or spending money on ads.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#74I 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…
This whole comment comes across as "you either got it, or you don't. it's something you're born with." 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…
I think there is some truth in it though. I think he's driving at the fact that good ideas tend to be _found_ as opposed to _generated_.
Sitting down to brainstorm ideas is a lot less likely to lead to a good idea than listening over a longer period of time.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#75I browsed the Envato / CodeCanyon popular products section looking for a product that enough people were buying and I felt confident about being able to build an improved version of. This was around 2015, I landed on a JavaScript image cropper and uploader. I built my own and have been working on it ever since.
It looks neat.
- Why Gumroad instead of Stripe/Paddle?
- How do you enforce licenses? Once they have the JS they can just stop paying?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#76I know this is usually not the best strategy for coming up with side projects but for me it's just always about solving my own problem. The downside is that I'm solving the problems mostly fellow nerds have that they usually want to solve themselve instead of paying someone to do it for them. What I'm trying to do more actively now is to always keep my eyes open at my day job and try to spot problems that are solved…
Interesting. How do potential users discover this?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#77I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. 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.
That's brilliant! How do you advertise/let others discover your product?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#78I run Buttondown ( http://buttondown.email/ ) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year. My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that: 1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor, 2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements; 3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipp…
How did you market this and get traction?
I'm going to answer for op here and point out the product exponentially self-advertises. As more people send emails using the app, even if there isn't a "Sent with Button-down" it's easy to find out the email-sender so customer's receiving the email think to themselves, I could do that, and use that nice product!
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole comment comes across as "you either got it, or you don't. it's something you're born with." 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…
I think there is some truth in it though. I think he's driving at the fact that good ideas tend to be _found_ as opposed to _generated_. Sitting down to brainstorm ideas is a lot less likely to lead to a good idea than listening over a longer period of time.
Agreed. I've occasionally tried using frameworks to generate ideas - none of which passed my sniff test. The really good ones come in the shower, so to speak.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you market this and get traction?
I'm going to answer for op here and point out the product exponentially self-advertises. As more people send emails using the app, even if there isn't a "Sent with Button-down" it's easy to find out the email-sender so customer's receiving the email think to themselves, I could do that, and use that nice product!
(Also 100% this.)