Ask HN: What to work on?

Is 30x500 some sort of framework? As in 30 tiny projects, aiming to generate $500 each?

Your problem seems to be a recurring theme here on HN and elsewhere. People building amazing stuff (as in intellectually stimulating, fun to build, difficult to do, impressive etc.) with amazing technology (shiny new languages, stacks etc.), launch it and yet nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to be willing to throw money at an app, service and so on. Why is that? People often build things that solve non-issues. And I love all of this, 99.5% of the stuff I build is purely for fun, learning, play and prove something (to myself). But that's not where the money is most of the time, though the things I learn from play are useful for the 0.5%.

I'm sure you read everything there is to know about the entire lean thing (Business Model Generation got mentioned already). Are you familiar with the work of Dane Maxwell [1]? As jasonswett wrote, the money is in the boring stuff. Dane Maxwell developed a robust and proven framework to help bootstrapped businesses with hands-on advice and mentoring. I highly recommend to have a look at his work and look up some of the success stories. It's very inspiring and you can learn a thing or two. His advice is more in the tune of people like DHH (you're much more likely to succeed in building a small company that solves a specific problem than, say, the next Facebook). Does it seem achievable for you to build an app with 50 users who pay €150 each? Or with 100 users who pay $70 each? Would you be happy with something like this for a start?

Pick something that solves a real problem in an area where there's money. B2B that is. Pick something that bothers you when you interact with other businesses as a starting point. Why is there friction? Work from there. Talk to those businesses and ask them what their biggest pain points are. What they would be willing to pay for if somebody (you) would solve it. You will have to pick up the phone, write emails and talk to people in person. That's all scary stuff (at least for me). You will be surprised what businesses are struggling with. Which things eat up tons of their resources and could be solved with open source solutions that you simply glue together. Once you find something that you think you can solve, nail the business owners down on it. Demand commitment. Make them part of the process and work closely with them. They will become your evangelists later on. Make them pay for a year in advance. That will truly validate your business idea. Only then start to build.

[1] http://thefoundation.com [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athefoundation.com *

* The website is built in a way that it's hiding some of the content. You get it for a share on Facebook or an email sign up - that's why I've chosen this form.

why did adwords object to the homepage?

The key is to find customers first. If you have a hunch that something should work, there is always a possibility that you can uncover some pain points that you can build a business around.

You need to speak to enough customers and iterate on what you offer to figure out the validity.

Coding stuff up is always a lot more comfortable, and a no-touch approach like adwords based validation is 'easy', but really, you need to be in front of people to understand if there is any validity to your thinking.

Open ended conversations around the problem area usually results in great insight and can lead to some valid ideas you can work off of. Also, speak to more than one person in a given problem area and it's not too hard to ask 'do you know anyone else that has this kind of problem?' to find a common theme and get an idea of a market size thats worth your time.

I think half of your advice is really good, and the other half not as much. We've all seen examples of seemingly useless things becoming very successful. Twitter, the Yo app, Let's Players, Beats by Dre, and so on. Your secondary advice of focusing on something and putting all your efforts into it is what separates toys from serious businesses. Most of our world runs on socially-fabricated needs and wants, so it's not surprising that things like yet-another-social-network or streaming yourself playing video games could be lucrative.

Concerning uTrim, I'd juste like to point out that you shouldn't limit yourself only to .edu. I'm a Comp. Science student at Concordia Unviersity[1] in Montreal, Canada and I personally hate it when certain services are limited to U.S. university users, when in fact they would be extremly useful for other students in different countries that do not use an .edu domain.

As an example, Concordia uses different email adresses depending on your faculty: @jmsb.concordia.ca, @encs.concordia.ca etc.

I believe it would be a good idea if you could implement a way of submiting "new" universities to the list of accepted schools, which can then be handpicked by youself. I suppose ideally a list of most universities available would be better. Dropbox used an amazing email list for their Space Race challange a few years ago, however I can't seem to find it.

[1] http://www.concordia.ca/