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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?

#51

Post by ken »

You'd be surprised how many problems are 'solved' but only barely. I use software that I hear people complain about every day. They have pretty sales webpages but the software itself is buggy, slow, hard to use, and support is unresponsive. Just make something 10% better and you would make a killing.

I'm avoiding mentioning a product or category not just to avoid throwing someone under the bus, but because I can think of many examples of this. None of the software (or any other kind of product) that I use today was the first of their kind. They learned the lessons from the earlier versions, and did it better.

Even if every problem you can think of has been solved (and I'm skeptical of that), I'm sure you don't think that all existing software is already perfect. Pick something that's terrible, and do it better.

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

#52

Post by isaacaderogba »

May not be exactly what you're looking for, but I find being exposed to abstract ideas quite helpful. An easy way to bring this sort of novelty into your life could be to watch a ~10 minute Ted Talk daily.

Ideally, you would then become more responsive to problems and have a wider solution set that perhaps doesn't just involve software.

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

#54

Post by aaavl2821 »

ronilan wrote: post #20
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…

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…

I think part of the issue is that the software startup playbook is not as generalizable as its advocates suggest it is, and an under-emphasis on domain expertise vs software expertise

For ex, in multi-stakeholder industries like healthcare where the people who pay for a product often have incentives that conflict with the incentives of the user of a product, following the North Star of "making something people want" can lead you astray. So many digital health companies make products no one will pay for, or that end up in a narrow consumer lifestyle niche instead of actually improving healthcare in a meaningful way. A team of engineers / data scientists who "follow the user" isn't enough. It isn't even enough to focus on physicians. You really need to talk to administrators and see how the sausage is made

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

mrfusion wrote: post #44
halfjoking wrote: post #8

The quickest way to build an impressive SaaS project in 2019: 1. Find a cool machine learning project with preferably pre-trained models so you don't have to do much cleaning/moving data. 2. Get those models doing inference on a server and expose it as an API. 3. ??? (marketing/sales/business stuff) 4. Profit

Any examples?

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by CodeCube »

jonnyrockit wrote: post #30

I was lucky and found a small little gem on 1kprojects.com that turned itself into a nice little profitable side-project in 5 weeks (not linking to it because i don't want to seem like I'm advertising). Making half my monthly salary at my day job from it. Sometimes it's just the simplest, least technical and gimmicky things that make money.

Bah, go ahead and link! you've demonstrated good will already by withholding the link ... but now I (and I'm sure we) are curious about it, if you're willing to share :)

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

#57

Post by halfjoking »

mrfusion wrote: post #44
halfjoking wrote: post #8

The quickest way to build an impressive SaaS project in 2019: 1. Find a cool machine learning project with preferably pre-trained models so you don't have to do much cleaning/moving data. 2. Get those models doing inference on a server and expose it as an API. 3. ??? (marketing/sales/business stuff) 4. Profit

Any examples?

There are probably a bunch on ProductHunt.

For example https://remove.bg got a lot of upvotes - it probably uses this on the backend:

https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/de...

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

#58

Post by bitL »

mrfusion wrote: post #44
halfjoking wrote: post #8

The quickest way to build an impressive SaaS project in 2019: 1. Find a cool machine learning project with preferably pre-trained models so you don't have to do much cleaning/moving data. 2. Get those models doing inference on a server and expose it as an API. 3. ??? (marketing/sales/business stuff) 4. Profit

Any examples?

Stock/Forex predictions with multiple ML models where clients could choose which ones they would like to follow. Bonus $ for showing them the best performing model for their portfolio etc. With a simple PWA app and UI and some scalable AWS/lambda instances to handle the load and a couple of instances to keep training/predictions set going.

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

#59

Post by bitL »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #4
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.

I have seen more success from freelancers -> very profitable side projects than any other form. It makes sense: you're being paid real money to provide a custom solution to a problem, so if you can make a generalizable version of that solution you can at least feel confident that you're solving a problem people will throw money at to fix. The most common thing I've seen is that freelancers will (as the situation call…

All freelancers should learn how to quickly assemble a simple SaaS (e.g. Bootstrap + Flask + Stripe) and then quickly implement a version of whatever they were doing in their paid projects (making sure it's legal ofc) and expose it as an SaaS using their SaaS template. They can even form a separate Delaware LLC for each of them, once the SaaS is built they can just try to sell it; lots of money there as well as not many people can build a company from the scratch.

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

#60

Post by weaksauce »

jonnyrockit wrote: post #30

I was lucky and found a small little gem on 1kprojects.com that turned itself into a nice little profitable side-project in 5 weeks (not linking to it because i don't want to seem like I'm advertising). Making half my monthly salary at my day job from it. Sometimes it's just the simplest, least technical and gimmicky things that make money.

What did you do in that 5 weeks to make it profitable?
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