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Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

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Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#121

Post by cdiamand »

1024core wrote: post #119
cdiamand wrote: post #46

I send out a daily newsletter with short snippets of pain points in different industries - http://www.oppsdaily.com Here is archive of sorts - http://www.oppslist.com The ideas are of a mediocre quality, but I find they help stimulate thought. Another idea is to go to a place like Fiverr and look at which services are most widely bought. Then build a saas solving one of those problems.

I looked at your list, sorted by "new": https://www.oppslist.com/?order=new And the opportunities listed all seem at least a year old. That's not very "new", is it?

Yep, you're right. I took a year off from generating the ideas to work on a few other projects. I'm dusting the cobwebs off everything now and getting it booted up again. Great catch!

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#122

Post by jjeaff »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #41
ronilan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use “the world is full” twice. First to describe the high supply of software developers looking for projects and second to describe the high demand for said services. So why hasn’t supply met demand? Why isn’t the market working more efficiently? There can be various explanations for that, obviously, including the lack of information you hint at ( “secret” , “have no idea” ), but Occam's Razor would suggest we ex…

Well I will doubt the supply side. I think it's a simpler assertion, because I know so few nerds.

I think if you live in silicon valley, you have a distorted view of how many people can build software.

I grew up in the mid-south and know of literally one or two other people that code.

I know live in a major metro area and still only know maybe 3 people that code. It is actually a rare skill.

At the same time, I can't even count how many contractors, real estate agents, sales and marketing, and doctors and lawyers that I know.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#123

Post by bikamonki »

Dont try to actually invent anything. Go B2B, find opportunities to automate/innovate an existing process/service, sell it as a monthly service (recurrent revenue is key), keep your costs ultra low (your time and infra). If one company buys it, two or more will.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#125

Post by kaybe »

rustyboy wrote: post #39
ageitgey wrote: post #6

The world is full of people in your situation who's main area of interest and experience is primarily in software development or start-ups. Because of this, almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times. There's tons of competition even for really bad ideas - just look at how many start-ups in SF tried to offer "laundry as a service"! The secret is to go out and make frie…

>The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. Great advice, my SO works outdoors doing field studies and the amount of shit they talk about doing manually is astounding. They pay people (or sometimes unpaid interns) to go through hours of videos documenting everything they see! Almost all cataloging and measurements are done with little to no…

I still remember this guy:

> I work at NASA creating procedures for spacewalks (EVAs).

> Currently we write these procedures in Microsoft Word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 (2013)

Hm, I wonder if they changed the system by now?

edit: Seems like there was still work to be done 3 years ago at least..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 (2016)

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#126

Post by equasar »

Chart library for JavaScript that is:

- Well documented

- Dev friendly

- High performant

- Framework-agnostic

- Written in modern JavaScript and well architected so it can be tree-shaked and prevent a huge bundle size

- TypeScript support

- Well priced

- Open source

The only decent one that I could find is https://github.com/amcharts/amcharts4 but is lacking from good tree-shaking support and performance

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#127

Post by dvdgsng »

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #2

Indie Hackers is a good resource https://indiehackers.com The lowest effort/highest reward ones I have seen are curated subscription email groups e.g. a vetted list of high quality freelancer jobs for freelancers.

offtopic: this site is a real PITA ...

https://i.imgur.com/waRlW5h.mp4

https://i.imgur.com/rms768q.mp4

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#128

Post by karanke »

equasar wrote: post #126

Chart library for JavaScript that is: - Well documented - Dev friendly - High performant - Framework-agnostic - Written in modern JavaScript and well architected so it can be tree-shaked and prevent a huge bundle size - TypeScript support - Well priced - Open source The only decent one that I could find is https://github.com/amcharts/amcharts4 but is lacking from good tree-shaking support and performance

I'm guessing you've already looked at these, but wondering what features are missing from the following tools:

1. plotly.js - https://plot.ly/javascript/

2. Vega Lite - https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#129

Post by 1024core »

cdiamand wrote: post #121
1024core wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at your list, sorted by "new": https://www.oppslist.com/?order=new And the opportunities listed all seem at least a year old. That's not very "new", is it?

Yep, you're right. I took a year off from generating the ideas to work on a few other projects. I'm dusting the cobwebs off everything now and getting it booted up again. Great catch!

Thanks! Looking forward to it.

Re: Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

#130

Post by ageitgey »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #21
ageitgey wrote: post #6

The world is full of people in your situation who's main area of interest and experience is primarily in software development or start-ups. Because of this, almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times. There's tons of competition even for really bad ideas - just look at how many start-ups in SF tried to offer "laundry as a service"! The secret is to go out and make frie…

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

The original poster is a college student looking for a side project to do in their spare time. It's not defeatism to suggest that they should probably look for side project ideas first in low-competition areas rather than in very competitive areas where multiple teams of experienced people have already failed.

Of course if they have a specific insight into a business that has failed ten times that they think is a major differentiator, then of course they should investigate that first. But then they wouldn't be posting on a forum for business ideas :)

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