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

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

#91

Post by mk89 »

stanmancan wrote: post #57
AussieWog93 wrote: post #43

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…

Yes, I would like to stress out that it's VERY likely that there are competitors. I believe nearly everything has been already created, and the idea of finding a niche market doesn't necessarily mean to innovate and do something nobody ever ever did, but it's more about offering another perspective of it -> simplification? Modern UI? Same business problem but different solution?

We're almost 8 billion people. If even just a half/quarter of them has a phone or a computer, you can't not find 100 freaking human beings that like what you built.

I am proudly building something in my free time that was probably made over and over, but always without something that I need. Or I have ideas on how such apps could improve, and I have the skill to do it myself, so... Plus the pleasure of learning new things in your free time, why not. Worst case scenario, you can still use your own app.

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

#92

Post by yieldcrv »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #43

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‘ve forced business ideas multiple times for 7 figures multiple times

My philosophy is a tweak in that it should take months of your life and not years

Rapidly iterate ideas until you have one that fits the criteria

Never get married to a position, that applies to the shares you created at a zero cost basis too.

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

#95

Post by auspex »

Here’s what you do. Come up with an MVP that does one very common workflow for your target market. Choose any market you’re familiar with.

The MVP workflow needs to be good enough that cold outreach would respond. “Oh I do that in my day job, I’ll take a look”

Then demo to them.

They will tell you why they can’t or won’t buy. They will say it needs X or Y or they will ask questions, “can you integrate with Google sheets?” You’ll probably do 50 of these and most won’t buy… but they will tell you either directly or indirectly why not. Now focus on removing the road blocks.

Just keep implementing features until the questions people have are already answered in the demo. People stop asking about features and start asking about pricing.

That’s the path I’ve taken and seems to work well.

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

#96

Post by antoinec »

I started https://www.tryethernal.com which is pretty niche (developer tooling for blockchain developers). I needed this tool when I got into Solidity development, and after a few hours of googling something like that, I couldn't believe it didn't already exist, so I built it.

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

#97

Post by rikschennink »

emadda wrote: post #75
rikschennink wrote: post #9

I 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?

Thanks!

- Back when I started I didn’t have a backend for customer accounts so it was useful that Gumroad handled that. Can upload a file and then allow access to active subscribers. Paddle didn’t, Stripe doesn’t handle EU VAT nonsense.

- I don’t. Pirates gonna Pirate. Customers have access to the last version released within their subscription period, license is perpetual.

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

#98

Post by herendin »

Remove your focus from making money. Direct yourself at getting better at skills in a generalized way. Indirectly I've learned a lot from my supplementary projects, which supplements my core skillset. My result serendipitously is profit although that's not my target

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

#99

Post by rikschennink »

mxuribe wrote: post #81
rikschennink wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Built a good product page with good keywords. I’ve also done some affiliate marketing which helped a lot with generating relevant traffic.

I try to write a lot of articles on web dev topics on my blog.

Additionally I built an open source file upload library (FilePond) which kind of acts as a stepping stone to the image editing solution. Easier to attract developers with a good free product. :)

Finally I’ve moved into offering free services that utilize the editor I built, I try to launch these on easy to remember domain names. They act as a demo of what the editor can do and they feature i tiny “powered by” link at the top.

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

#100

Post by lockdown22 »

I'm running DeltaRay / MesoSim, the advanced option backtesting service: https://portal.deltaray.io

My decade long journey of trading: Beginning of my career at IBM I was doing processor and system simulations (Cell, PowerPC). We developed a simulation method there, which was published as: "Mesoscale Performance Simulations of MultiCore Processor Systems"

Meanwhile in an other dimension my uncle tried his luck with trading, without much success. I realised that simulators and backtesters are related and that made me interested trying out trading algos.

Learned about StatArb from Ernie Chan's books, created my own version (now open source at https://github.com/tibkiss/huba-v1) and slowly started trading it. It didn't win or lose much either. Later, I found Quantopian and extended their engine to be able to trade live, on-prem (https://zipline-live.net). Ported my StatArb to zipline-live, still limited succes. Finally moved to QuantConnect, similar result. Tried other algos (mean reversion, momentum), which seemed to work better (in bull market).

Started my sabbatical in 2020 to focus on trading and to learn more about statistics and options. I found that premium of options (theta decay) can be successfully extracted via income strategies. The tricky part there is to not to kill yourself with leverage and learn to hedge your position. Learned that majority of the folks are using manual backtesting using a Windows based software, what I also tried. I realized that backtesting one year manually takes approximately 1 hour. Very useful, but super time consuming.

I decided to create a purpose built descriptor for Options Trading to expedite the process. Bought options data, implemented the backtester using similar approach what we used at processor and cloud simulations: Model what's really important and use good enough approximations for the rest. MesoSim was (re)born.

Shared the Service with groups of similar interest, they found it useful to expedite their options trading process. In the last 6 months had a couple of thousand visitors and a solid set of paying customers now.

Went on and started creating content, here is one trade as an example: https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-ng-an-optimized-boxcar

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