As I keep hearing about the tech layoffs, I can't help but think about starting a side hustle. But I have no idea how to find the right niche nor project idea.
So how did you folks do it?
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?
#2I think about the guy who built remoteok.com and his suite of sites. They are all "open" in the sense that he publishes some basic financials. It's fascinating to see how things grow over time. Most of the time projects take a long time to generate anything substantial.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#3"A smart man learns from his own mistakes, a wise man learns from others."
When I was about 25, I saw a 40 year old man get fired. I swore I'd never care if I got fired. Seems similar to your epiphany.
The right niche or project idea is:
1. You know where to find the customers 2. You know the customers pay for similar projects 3. You can build what the customers pay for
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#4Interested in this also, in what industry are you working? Maybe we could brainstorm some issues together?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#5I 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 by excel sheets or a lot of manual work.
Example: "I always forget about things I bookmarked on Twitter"
Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks (https://getbirdfeeder.com). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#6I 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-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API — basically developer-adjacent functionality.) [^1]
I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.
[^1]: People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#7YC 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 people would pay to solve? Are there enough of those people?)
- Validating problems is more important than having them (is there any signal indicating people will? Has anyone actually given you money to solve this problem?)
keep in mind the idea is not the most important bit.
As far as doing #1 (getting you in the mindset), it really depends on what your goals are (don't let anyone tell you that "making money" is not a worthwhile goal), but in general one of the best practical things you can do is start running with an entrepreneurial crowd.
If you can't find a gaggle of entrepreneurs in meatspace, try sites like MicroConf, IndieHackers (read stories of other IndieHackers) and others. Start listening to podcasts that are by/for entrepreneurs (beware of get rich quick schemes obviously).
I literally write and send my ideas to people every week[1], trust me that when you start looking/thinking about startup ideas, they are everywhere. I have over 600 notes from what has to be less than 3 years of starting to write them down.
Personally what works for me is to:
- Go through life, witness something painful/weird/broken
- Have an idea of how you could solve/streamline that or think about what might be interesting to look into as a leverage point (maybe you can't solve it, but why is X like that?)
- Write it down
- Review the idea at a later date when you actually want to execute on something, start fleshing it out by adding research and trying to find your customer/talk to them.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#8I 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…
>"I always forget about things I bookmarked on Twitter"
>Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks (https://getbirdfeeder.com). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers.
This is fantastic. I'm gonna check it out.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#9I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#10I 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…
>"I always forget about things I bookmarked on Twitter" >Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks ( https://getbirdfeeder.com ). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers. This is fantastic. I'm gonna check it out.
Thanks! I'm actively working on it and recently added full text search across your bookmarks which is something not available on Twitter right now (and was fun to build, which is the factor I mostly optimize for in my side projects)