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Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.

30 points by JohnnySpaghetti ↗ HN
Hi HN,

For the last few weeks I've been trying to come up with ideas for income generating side projects ($500-1K range). Things I've considered:

- SaaS, physical products, etc. related to activities or hobbies I personally enjoy.

- Online drop-shipping store (selling products from e.g. AliExpress) catering specific niches.

- Review websites for specific niches, monetization via Amazon Affiliate links.

I used the AdWords Keyword Planner tool to research different niches, see how many monthly searches they have on average, and how much the suggested bid is.

I tried pretty much every niche I could possibly think of, no matter how small or ridiculous. What I found is all those niches are already quite saturated. Same story for stuff related to my personal interests.

Now I'm stuck and out of ideas.

Perhaps you guys could help me come up with new ideas. Are there any niches you're personally interested in that you feel are underserved or could use some competition? Any products or services you wish existed?

Thanks!

47 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 88.8 ms ] thread
ladytron
Go somewhere that has very little technology - maybe where there are a lot of older people or poor people. Analyse the market and see if you can automate something or streamline a process with technology. Look for problems in a low tech area you can solve with a bit of tech.
atmosx
I believe that all the ideas you mentioned could work, if implemented correctly by a skilled entrepreneur or dedicated team. None of it seems brilliant or original by any means, but generally speaking, the idea is overrated.. Even apparently stupid ideas (another note app? Really? REALLY? - another bookmarking app? Oh please...) can work wonders if executed correctly.
JohnnySpaghetti
Thank you! If you have any personal experience on this, I'd love to hear it.
tomcam
Classic motivation for successful projects like this is pain points. Do you have any itches that could be scratched by a technological solutions?
arisAlexis
funny I have the opposite problem. I have a ton of them in a backlog but don't have time to implement.
JohnnySpaghetti
Would you be willing to share some of those ideas? I can contact you privately if you prefer.
arisAlexis
you haven't mentioned anything from your background, most of them are app based. you can find my email on my profile
CuriouslyC
The way I see it, the biggest opportunities for the foreseeable future are VR and tools that leverage deep learning to enable unskilled people to produce high quality creative works (e.g. neural drawing, neural music making, neural writing, etc). Doing a side project in either of these areas is more likely to lead to something revolutionary, and even if you fail your job prospects will be greatly improved. On the other hand, both of these areas are hard, but in life, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
mrfusion
What do you recommend for a VR project?
CuriouslyC
A game would be the easiest thing to get started with. I think down the line, virtually exploring places via scene reconstruction from multiple cameras is going to be absolutely epic, but that is a fairly hard problem.
fspear
I have a feeling that e-learning is going to be the killer app for VR/Augmented reality.
0xdeaddead
This is one of the hype filled and most valley answers I've ever read. You even used the word "revolutionary". Jony is that you?
CuriouslyC
What were you trying to accomplish with this comment?
0xdeaddead
Put some reality into the conversation.

The OP's opening sentence asked for a project to make $500-$1000, not ride a hype wave.

CuriouslyC
Do you think that is a good reason to be snarky?

The title of the OP's post wasn't "I need a way to make some quick extra cash". Most people I know work on side projects more for learning and career development. I gave an answer based on that prior belief.

Sometimes, hype exists because things are genuinely cool. I feel this is the case for VR and smart tools. On the other hand, I'd be inclined to agree with you about chat bots, for instance.

fspear
I agree however, creating something revolutionary in these spaces takes more than just fiddling with a couple of tensorflow tutorials or udacity courses.

For instance I've always wanted to have a music recommendation engine/app that instead of using collaborative filtering uses some kind of machine learning or deep learning algorithm(s) to identify lyric sentiment, complexity and melodic/rhythmic patterns to recommend me music based on that (across different genres). It turns out that something that seemed straightforward (I really thought I could tackle this after playing around with tensorflow and machine learning tutorials & MOCS) actually requires a lot of specialized/intimate knowledge about how these algorithms work and the theory behind them, I would need to spend quite some time studying (and understanding) before I can even begin coding this as a side project for instance.

mindcrime
Offhand, I would have thought that would be limited more to knowledge about audio signal processing and what-not, than the actual machine learning itself. I mean, yeah, you can get REALLY deep in the weeds with neural networks, but you can do an awful lot without doing so. If you ever feel like writing about this, I think a lot of people might find value in a blog post from you about what challenges you ran into and what you found out so far. I know I would.
fspear
Yes you are absolutely right, DSP knowledge is also a must. I didn't get that far, I started by identifying what makes people like a certain song and got it down to: Lyrical themes (and overall artist thematic) and melodic and rhythmic patterns. For instance by analyzing data from last.fm I found that a lot of people that listen to Black Metal also seem to have an interest in european/celtic/gaelic folk music, but not all only certain artists with specific lyrical themes and what seemed to me as specific melodic patterns.

Anyway the thing that stumped me was identifying/creating the "features" for rhythmic & melodic patterns, eventually I realized that I was way out of my league and had to drop it.

Later on I found that someone else was already working on this: http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html

0xdeaddead
Don't create anything new, find a product that people use (and pay for) but are not 100% satisfied with, and make it better.
fspear
"Making it better" is usually not a simple task, specially for established products.
Exclamationmark
I have a couple of ideas that I do not have the skill to create and am happy to share. One I am interested in using if you build it. What's the best way to contact you to share them?
fspear
I'm stuck in the same spot. I agree that a lot of niches are already quite saturated.

Are you open to collaborate? Maybe if we put our heads together we could think of something.

JohnnySpaghetti
That would be awesome :) How do I contact you?
fspear
Can I contact you? A bit hesitant about putting my email here.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
JPLeRouzic
* Many new jobs exist only to make sure that some robot works correctly. Even heavy equipment are robotized and remote controlled nowaday. Maybe you can create one million jobs thanks to a portal that would enable employers to recruit capacity to monitor through Internet, it would be improved later (two years) with capacity to assess and much later (10 years?) to operate equipments. The employer buy capacity, not a team. The employees bid for the job, but several can work simultaneously. A majority logic helps to verify if they are reliable. There is a reputation system for employees.
gressquel
I have a cool project that I started on but didnt have time to finish. Anyone interested PM me, its stack; .net core Html Jquery

.net core / c# is the only requirement

JohnnySpaghetti
Sweet! What's the best way to contact you?
gressquel
Im kinda shy writing my email here. Could I maybe contact you instead?
ejanus
Mail me(interested)...mail address in my profile page
gressquel
I cannot see any contact details on your profile. user: ejanus

created: 2036 days ago

karma: 22

about: Software programmer

su8898
hi, I am interested. could you please share the details? su88981 [at] gmail [dot] com. thanks so much.
mindcrime
One idea you could try is this: take an "old" idea and "remix" it, improve it, etc. The book Rethink[1] has a lot on this. And it makes sense.. in computing, things really tend to go in cycles and what's old is often new again. Take Neural Networks for example. This is an idea that's so old it's practically archaic. But add some new ideas on training (backprop, discovered in the 80's or so), along with hardware advances due to Moore's Law and the advent of the GPU, as well as the surge in data volumes enabled by the Internet, always-connected devices and advances in storage technology, and BOOM... you have the hottest topic in the world today.

So go back in time... read old computing books, read old issues of InfoWorld or Network Computing from the 90's or early 2000's, or find some old issues of Byte magazine on Ebay, and mine through those... and find an old idea that can be combined with some new advances or new technologies, to make something that's mondo radical.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Rethink-Surprising-History-New-Ideas/...

theoh
I'm sure I've read a jokey guide to succeeding as a CS grad student that tells you to do exactly this, but tongue-in-cheek. Maybe someone else will recall the URL.
b_emery
"Live in the future, then build what's missing."

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Looks of good meta advice there. Also, read a lot from adjacent fields. I do this in research and the cross pollination is a big source of ideas. See the book "Where good ideas come from" for details.

Based on watching my kids, I'm convinced that we're input-output machines. If I give them a bunch of ideas (without them realizing it) I see these ideas come back later, distorted and recombined with other ideas in their play. I think that basic mechanism of creativity is inherent - and also very useful.

jason_slack
I have some ideas for HFT and also a few ideas for blockchain uses. I don't have time to work on them. Email me if you want.
pravenj
maybe hack a project for extreme affordability from hackproject.org? More problem discussion in the slack channel where you can self-register hackprojectorg.herokuapp.com. Even old problems or simple problems that you might have not even looked at with passing eyes could have dramatic effect for extremely rural areas and what the UN calls the frontier worlds.
nassir
Might be worth exploring emerging and frontier markets in areas such as payments etc. What I've come to realize is that in the US market at least, the cost of customer acquisition is high and continues to rise, hence if you are not well capitalized, within a short span you are out of the game
nnn1234
I would say look at indiehackers and see if there is something similar you want to do. Also why not join someone else s project? Collaborate on something that's close to your vision get them to sales and voila.
nnn1234
Here is a place where you can easily create a group around your idea. Github exists for coders, people are massaging it for other projects. Crowdsourcing platforms are many but each have their faults. I am building a platform for anyone to contribute to projects. We are disrupting the future of work. PLease check out www.crowdraising.co/metacampaign and there is an explainer video that does the job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3QT4lqco8M