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Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

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81–90 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and how have you been doing?

First tried to release my product on Envato but the market turned out to be a race to the bottom and it wasn’t sustainable, couldn't get past $3K per month without drowning in support tickets. Moved to sell the product on my own website under my own terms and by now I’m at $20K+ per month revenue, which is pretty crazy.

That sounds really amazing! Would you be willing to share how you marketed your product - once you moved to selling from your own website? Certainly a big challenge is trying out an idea, but the next challenge is scaling adoption to make some worthwhile money. (By "scaling", i'm not referring to hypergrowth, web company scale....just, you know, maybe a side hustle or even making a modest full-time livelihood.)

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#82
post #77
post #63

I 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?

I started off by buying Google Ads, but I lost money running them. Eventually I stopped running the ads and focused on writing blog posts. Also I think the domain sort of helps.

I wrote a bit more about the start here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zer...

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#83
i started https://hourly.fyi about a month ago. it was inspired by a reddit post asking for such a thing to exist. i didn’t think it would get a large response right away but a couple advertisers have reached out and i’m beginning to talk to them.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#84
I built very simple tool in an industry that I wanted to be part of and was surprised to find that a few people wanted to pay for it. I mean very basic - done in three days.

A few months improving that and soaking up everything I could find (newsletters/press/blogs) led me to noticing a larger opportunity in the same industry so I built that and now it supports me full-time.

So I would advise picking an industry or niche that you're interested in (preferably one that's growing and not particularly tech-savvy) and then spend some time reading up on what people in that industry talk, write and complain about. There are opportunities everywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#85
I've read these money-making materials for 2 years, I don't think there's any answer that actually answer to why it doesn't work .. including this "how to come up with idea" question which is a "why I can't come up with good idea" question. With enough reading, I start to realize those are at best some heuristics for your "actually doing things in brute-force manner". If many lessons are actually working, the "90-95% fail" might be reduced to 60% by now.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#86
post #66

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…

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…

Honestly, with all skills there are people who naturally "get it" and those that naturally don't. Doesn't matter if it's programming, sports or entrepreneurship.

The reason I left a discouraging comment is that, unlike the other examples, people in certain communities (including here!) have a weird tendency where they feel they must become a successful entrepreneur or they've failed in life.

This is especially bad because businesses started because the founder wants to be an entrepreneur (as opposed to those businesses where the founder has organically come across a real problem to solve/gap in the market) tend to fail in the most awkward ways possible.

We glorify this failure as "real world education", but every time I've seen someone go through this before and it genuinely breaks them.

>Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.

Cheeky comment aside, what I meant by this is that most good ideas aren't generated by a logical process but instead by (often viscerally) observing something that makes you go "WTF".

Thoughts like "Why does existing product x suck so much?" or "Why is it so hard/expensive to do simple thing x?" or "Why do customer base x pay so much for this dead basic product?" are good launch points for a profitable business, whereas "what would a product look like that makes life easier for niche segment x"[1] generally isn't.

The former are more reactions that "jump out" as you as you do other things, whereas the latter is a sit-down task that you work through.

[1] Of course, questions like these have their place, but not when you're creating the initial idea.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#87

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…

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Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#88
post #24
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying and I felt the same way. I think as a tech person you always undervalue your products as you see it as “something I could build in a weekend”, which is very different to how other people see it. There’s many Twitter tools in the same price range and the feedback from people I got is that they are happy to pay that.

I don't know, I don't even have (never had) a Twitter account, so I completely fail to see any particular utility in the whole stuff (I mean Twitter), but since everyone went on the barricades against the 7.99, no wait 11 if via Apple ;), blue mark/whatever recent idea I figured that Twitter users were philosophically against a paid for subscription.

The problem with that idea is not having to pay in general, but the fact that you can buy a symbol associated with being trustworthy for a very low price. Which had the result of fake accounts buying it and damaging actual companies with their tweets.

PS: I'm not a Twitter user, but I'm familiar with the topic.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#89

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…

Competitors are great, and how our company picks many of its projects. Lots of stuff out there has serious deficiencies, especially when it comes to UX. A not insignificant number of our projects started because someone thought some app or website was more convoluted and difficult to use than it should be.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#90

I started uploading videos on YouTube on Tech and Photography as I enjoy both: https://www.youtube.com/@_stevenfoster 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…

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