Ask HN: How to find profitable side project idea?

[adamfaliq]

Hi there HNers,

Last summer I worked on a startup as lead developer. I learnt about running a startup and talking to users while working there. I have now quit working there to focus on my studies (second year university in London).

I would like to work on a side project that eventually would lead to some revenues this summer. My question is, how did you find problem(s) to solve ?

I have read books and blogs suggesting that the best problem is the one that I have faced before. I find it difficult to do this when almost every problem that I found, there has always been existing solution or the solution can be solved with some quick searches.

Any idea or thought is really appreciated. Thank you.

[ageitgey]

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 friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. The world is full of profitable niche industries that need custom solutions that software developers have no idea exist. The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs. Those are all areas ripe for new products and many of the top companies in those niche areas have no idea how to apply technology to solve their problems more efficiently.

[balls187]

> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

I'd slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries.

Having a good idea is only the first step. You need to be able to market it, and ultimately sell it.

Business owners face business problems, will have an idea on how much they're willing to spend on it, and will understand the budgets and where they can be applied. Rank and file employees often do not make purchasing decisions on behalf of their companies. Some may, but most do not.

My personal story:

I became friends with the owner of a nearby gym, and I was immediately impressed with how he ran his business, and more importantly his ability to stay ahead of the curve, learning and adopting new ways to market his business.

For a free membership, I would do one off small projects, that typically string together API's offered by the different services he used (Scheduling, waivers, forms). None was particularly interesting, until he came up with a hodgepodge system for contacting new members.

I helped him build some flexibility, and we both came to the conclusion that if we built a platform that specifically did this, we could market it and sell it.

We boot strapped it and made about $13k in revenue the first year.

Now that we have a viable business, we've shifted to growth: get customers.

[rustyboy]

>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 technology. Another example; I volunteer for a program that does some human intake and processing, before I got there everyone used a series of paper forms that got updated by work of mouth. Now? Google Spreadsheets.

There's hundreds of industries, organizations, and groups that do extremely manual labor intensive work because it hasn't even occurred to them it can be automated or turned in to a service, but you'll never meet them if you hang around tech people all the time because the solution is always on their mind.

[ronilan]

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 examine the assumptions first.

I’m not so sure that there is such a strong demand side in this market.

[TAForObvReasons]

> 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.

[mindcrime]

The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

I agree with this, but I'd add one more point. In addition to face-to-face time with these people (which can be hard to come by, either on your end or on theirs), you can try to learn about other industries by reading their books, whitepapers, journals, etc., watching their videos, documentaries, etc., and following industry trade magazines, analyst reports, and the like. This stuff you can at least do on your own time, late at night or on the weekends, whenever you have time to spare.

Given this kind of research, you can put together a tentative "value hypothesis" regarding a potential solution in some other space. Then you can maximize the value of your face-to-face time with other people by talking through a specific hypothesis, instead of just an open-ended fishing expedition.

Of course, if somebody is willing to give you a half day of their time, and you have that half day free, then go for it. But generally, people are more open to sharing their time if you can make it clear that you respect their time and that the interaction will be somewhat directed / focused.

[jen729w]

I’ve thought about doing this sort of thing, but co-opt a friend/colleague/someone your husband knows as the SME in the different industry.

You need the insight in to that industry — by definition, you don’t have it. So find that person, and don’t just take their idea and leave. Work with them. Have them be the champion in the industry for this thing you make. Who knows best where the thing can be sold? They do!

[antoineMoPa]

Not that I want to be anti-innovation, but what if spreadsheets allow the user to be more in control, have more flexibility and avoid monthly payments of 3-5 cloud services? Maybe replacing every spreadsheet is not optimal.

[U597418]

This is horrible advice. You're positing that there is no room for innovation within the software development domain. This is a stupid assertion.

[neillyons]

This is great advice.

[mittermayr]

Don't throw away an idea because someone else has already made it. This is crucial. People completely underestimate the amount of money you can make as a runner-up, or even as a 5th or 10th-place service in some markets. Most of the products I'm involved with have made me quite substantial amounts over the years compared to the minimal time required to upkeep them. There's at least ten companies I can name at an instant that do almost exactly the same, yet I still make money doing the very same thing. Appreciate the invaluable advantage a market-proven idea brings and focus on whatever its target audience lacks or loves most about the most-popular offering. It doesn't mean you have to copy something (where's the fun in that), but consider this if you start working on something and then come across someone who's done the exact same thing with good success. Don't give up, use it.

[opportune]

There are actually pretty straightforward reasons why it's not necessarily optimal to be first-to-market. Someone else has already tons of research into product-market fit and made mistakes along the way that you can emulate and learn from respectively. They've also jump started demand in the market for a similar product that perhaps has different features/quality/pricing

[fierro]

see: gitlab

[cdiamand]

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.

[stevematzal]

I checked out your project and it looks pretty good, I like the fact that ideas also have an estimated value attached to them. Would you mind if I included some of your ideas in my own project - Idea Miner (https://ideaminr.com)? Of course, I will mention the source.

[1024core]

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?

[misiti3780]

this is a great idea. thank you for making this. -- i just tried to subscribe but your subscription link(s) are hanging. can you add me (email in profile) ?

[writepub]

OppsDaily is a brilliant! I'm loving reading real-world problems that people are willing to pay for. Well done.

[dawidw]

Can you share any successful story regarding that service? That someone resolved problem and become rich?

[mikekchar]

After many decades of coming up with ideas, I have discovered something. Every single one of my good ideas have been ideas that somebody else also had. It shouldn't be surprising because there are something like 7.7 billion people in the world. If you have a good idea that nobody else had, then that's a 1 in 7.7 billion idea ;-) Having realised this, I now use the fact that the idea is already known to be a good test of how good the idea is. If the idea has already been tried then I get an even better idea of how good it was.

Here's the thing: the world is not short on good ideas. Actually, you don't even need to have one to be successful. You just need to be able to recognise a good idea. The rest is execution. You execute better, you will win bigger.

Here's another cool thing I learned in decades of looking at the technology world: name one dominant company whose product was the first to market in its field. I literally can't find one! They probably exist (and this is HN, so there will be someone coming along shortly to point it out to me ;-), but the most important thing to realise is that most (by an incredible margin) successful projects became successful be learning from the previous king in its area. Word processor, spreadsheet, OS, game (of any genre), source control service, etc, etc, etc.

Don't be afraid not to innovate. Learn how to deliver. Learn how to distinguish between good and bad. Learn how to optimise the good. Learn how to please unhappy customers of existing products. Learn how to do all that while making money, not spending it.

Or the other way is just to close your eyes and pretend you invented it. If you become dominant, nobody will realise you weren't the first ;-)

[jonnyrockit]

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.

[RickS]

To the extent you're willing to comment, I'd be interested in knowing about your criteria for selecting such a project.

- was the domain related to your expertise, or in a niche that was new to you?

- what made this project stand out from others / appear to have potential?

- was codebase quality a factor in purchase?

- do you inherit things other than software from the seller? EG customers, marketing channels, analytics, etc?

- what was the value-add that made it work under your stewardship but not the seller's Sales / marketing / dev / featureset / etc

- Are you interested in doing this repeatedly?

[CodeCube]

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 :)

[justboxing]

Wow, didn't know about this site. Thanks for the referral. 1kprojects.com seems to have a better list of active projects than sideprojectors.com , which is the only site I know of where people sell or barter side projects.

[weaksauce]

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

[brianbreslin]

@adamfaliq here are my bulletpoint suggestions: - find something people are doing in excel over and over, make it a saas (search google keywords for excel templates) - find something that currently costs people time to do (some form of shopify work?) and automate it or make it a profit center for someone - pick an existing marketplace (salesforce, shopify, magento, etc) and build something there so you're spending less on marketing and know there is a built in audience used to paying for things

at its core it is a matter of can you save people money? time? or can you make them more money? those are the reasons people pay for things. Also competing on price alone is a fools errand.

feel free to email me for more help, i literally do this for a living (helping students generate and grow their businesses at a university).

[halfjoking]

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

[AznHisoka]

Alternative: build datasets that offers insights on X.

Examples: - Newswhip crawls news articles and uses the FB api to get share counts. Newsrooms use their data to find out what is trending

- SuperData crawls info from Twitch and YouTube to provide insights into the games that are engaging.

- Similarweb provides data into the traffic that websites are getting

- AppAnnie scrapes App rankings to provide insights into the growth and trends of apps.

- Ahrefs built a huge database of backlinks and provides insights into who is linking to your site or your competitors.

[vilaca]

you lost me at 3.

[mrfusion]

Any examples?

[krschacht]

Find a popular service (Salesforce, Wufoo, Asana, Xero, Gmail, etc) and scour the forums for things people repeatedly request to be added. Pick a popular request that you have reason to believe won’t be added as a feature soon (e.g. company said so, it’s been years of waiting, it’s outside of obvious product expansion, etc). Go build it as an add-on (chrome extension, api, etc). Market it on the forums. You can even reach out to people and ask in advance if they would pay. Show them screenshot mockups and state a price.

[thakobyan]

I was in a similar situation as you except I have a full-time job. I started https://cronhub.io a year ago and it's currently a profitable side-business.

You don't need to focus on the idea too much. I think it's important but seeing other companies solving the same problem should not discourage you to come up with your own solution.

Take a look at these products for inspiration (https://www.indiehackers.com/products) and some of them solve a similar problem but they still co-exist.

[bbx]

Thanks for using Bulma ;-)

[throwaway-1283]

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.

[michaelbuckbee]

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 calls for it) strike a deal with their client to carve out a feature as an independent SAAS, bill the customer a much reduced rate for that "set" of work and bring them on as the first "customer" of the SAAS so there's some social proof.

[dvdgsng]

offtopic: this site is a real PITA ...

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

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

[elorant]

There are tons of problems that haven't been solved. Best way to identify one is to get involved with small companies and find their pain points. Especially ones not directly involved in technology. Think about commerce shops for example. Or art shops. Or food shops. You have to gain experience from the inside to come up with an idea, or if that's not possible just go ahead and ask them directly to name a few of their issues.

I did a consulting gig for an art gallery a couple years ago and I came up with a dozen ideas by watching how they operated. I'm sure the same applies for a gazillion of markets out there, ones where technology isn't that dominant.

Side note. You may want to take a look at the famous "passive income" threads in here. There are hundreds of ideas and projects in them that could inspire you to build something new. Just make a search for "passive" on the search box at the bottom and good reading.

[rc_kas]

Thats hard to answer. And to be honest, if I had any good ideas, I would probably work on them myself.

Sometimes you just have to compete against existing ideas and try to do better than them.

[mrskitch]

I, honestly, picked a library that I was passionate about (puppeteer) and sorted by either most commented or most reacted. This plus the fact that I was having hosting issues with Headless Chrome. browserless.io came quickly after.

[hogu]

I know this sounds dumb, but I found this to be very useful

https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-becomi...

It's an entertaining read, but the premise is

- idea generation is a skill - you need to practice - come up with 10 garbage ideas per day (and occasionally one or two are good)

[verulito]

this!

[philbo]

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

[dilippkumar]

+1

Follow up reading: Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One”

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...

[rorygibson]

I did a joke side project that encouraged users to pay $1 for a ridiculous startup idea ("Uber for firemen" or "Disrupt the cat grooming industry")

It made me $25 - but gave me the next idea. It had turned out to be more annoying than I imagined to put a payment button on a website (unless I wanted to use PayPal. I didn't - I use Stripe).

Without running a back-end, like an ecommerce app or a home-rolled Heroku app or something - for token exchange, you can't use Stripe. I don't mind building that kind of thing, but I figured other people must.

So I built Trolley [1] - it's a popup payments widget / cart, using Stripe, that works just by pasting in a snippet of HTML.

4 months later and I've got a few hundred users, I've started marketing it specifically to JAMstack and static site people, and I'm enjoying making it, very much.

[1] - https://trolley.link

[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.

[vaib]

Would you be willing to give a few examples of such products if I messaged you separately?

[Xolo]

Let dissect this a little,

1. List 3-5 things that you enjoy doing routinely 2. Now imagine how you can improve some of its aspects 3. What would that ideal world look like? 4. Everything can be improved!

Mine - Meditation - When I was starting guided meditation options were limited, still are to an extent. Some are expensive and some are limited with options. It does not have to be a solo journey like mine and many others' were. If I did not have anything to work on I'd create a database of guided meditation tools resources, there are 1000's on youtube. I'd categorise them by mood, skills-level etc... Have a basic social aspect to it by adding a community that share the passion and I then can introduce paid features such as Journaling etc. By leveraging the free database of contents out there one would have a decent competitive advantage. Just a thought...

[ElijahLynn]

I thought about this a while ago. And while I have about 5 really solid ideas already I want to make time to execute... if I didn't here is what I would do.

I would go out and take part time jobs in all sorts of industries. Go be a landscaper for 2 weeks. Ride shotgun in a trucking rig for 2 weeks. Tag along with a surgeon for a day or two. I think that I would leave with a ton of ideas.

There is (was at least) even a website where you can pay others to apprentice them for a "day in the life", some are talented, some are celebrities.

Think of when kids play, if there are toys everywhere they will end up combining the ideas in different ways. But if the toys are boxed up and put away in between different experiences, they might never put toy A and toy B together, draining them of potential creativity.

The noise equals creative opportunity. Get some more noise!

[mark242]

1. Go to your nearest finance department, either in the company you're working for or a relative's company, whatever.

2. Find a specific task that they're using Excel to accomplish.

3. Make a web app that reduces their clicks and typing into Excel.

4. Charge whatever you want-- they will pay.