Ask HN: How to come up with monetizable side project ideas?
I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life. Having been worked in different companies over the last 4 years, I feel I've acquired enough knowledge to develop big applications(big enough to make money) on my own.
I was wondering, how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side. Any inputs, resources and wisdom are appreciated!
124 comments
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https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times.
> I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life.
Sounds like you have already build something. Brush those up, make them available for the public and for the start don't think about how you will make money from those. You will get users and feedback. Those might help you in building something which will earn money.
You realize that that's how it felt like to most people at almost any point of time in the human history?
Ask someone you know who doesn’t work in technology what they need. A teacher, a plumber, your doctor, your mechanic. I guarantee that someone will come up with something.
Us geeks think all of the problems have been solved because most of our problems have been solved. Meanwhile the rest of the world doesn’t know that we can actually help them because they don’t know to ask and we don’t think to.
I could list off a ton of programs I'd love to have, but are way (way way way) too niche to pop up on the radar of anyone who doesn't work in security.
This is the major point. The market is HUGE, and it's very possible still to build a better mousetrap and capture enough customers for a decent side income.
Assume your audience already knows the competition, and differentiate.
Dataloggers are a dime a dozen, but yet someone still wanted to pay more than the price of buying three off the shelf units simply because what he wanted was slightly different from everything he could find.
The point is that it doesn't matter how many times something has been done; there's always something different you can do that a niche of customers need.
The downside of this kind of project is that it can often be quite time-consuming, and often-times you wonder if failures are caused by the parts you can't see; the owners not soldering/wiring things properly.
I've had interactions where my "code was broken", which mysteriously got fixed without me making any changes. Throw in timezones into the mix, and you can waste a day looking for a bug that just isn't there.
But I far prefer working with actual businesses because they just want an end result and won't try to dicker with me by pointing out how high my prices are and how much less "this guy on Guru.com" can do it for.
The thing I truly love about the Arduino ecosystem is how fast it lets me put together those one-off projects. Things that would take weeks in "normal engineering" can be out the door in an evening. What I don't like about Arduino is that the focus on simplicity often comes with a huge cost in performance. Luckily, it's rarely been an issue.
Couple of other thoughts -- your problems are likely not to be technical. They're going to be obtaining domain knowledge, marketing, and supporting your product.
I'll second the recommendation on "Start Small, Stay Small". Also Eric Reis' "Lean Startup" and 37 Signals "Getting Real". The latter two were really helpful in getting my most successful project out the door and making money.
Advertising on FB/AdWords/etc can help, but there's no substitute for finding your customers yourself.
Collect stories and examples of successful side projects that resonate with you. (You can start by searching HN. This gets talked about a fair amount here.)
Also, collect your ideas and start fleshing them out.
Also, collect information on how small side projects get monetized.
For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site.
Monetizing it is still an issue...
Many of his books consisted of freely available government publications.
It is an ugly looking site, the forums are full of nasty comments, but it is still useful at some level I guess. They claim to get millions of page views. Not sure how much money they make, but they have been around for more than a decade
Second big problem: SEO. Search engines like long form written content, they don't know how to value tools that slice and dice data: they simply don't see any value in it and you'll never get SEO from it.
It turned out to be a fairly low quality way to find leads. Random cold calling would have probably netted me the same conversion rate.
2) Find Entrepreneurs that have had a couple of hits, and don't have the time or resources for small things. They'll more than likely just give you the idea.
3) Pick up freelance gigs and get an agreement that give you rights to the underlying code. (I.E. the unique combination of elements belongs to the client.) If you do enough of this you will start to find efficiencies. You will start finding ideas all over the place when you see how other people work.
4) Read a lot. But about niche things.
5) Read blog articles by Venture Capitalists/ Angels. don't work for them... but built the stuff that they want built.
Also... Please build a themeforest for Bulma. I haven't had time to do it and I hate working in Bootstrap.
Maybe find areas where people use excel sheets/ or word/pdf forms that they email around to each other. Always seemed like an idea to me.
Disclaimer: just a wantrepreneur.
1. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. https://getlatka.com
2. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value.
3. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it.
4. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers.
I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.
Edit: To expand on my reasoning, don’t make it hard for people to contact you. There’s no reason to be afraid of spurious email contacts. They’re easy to mark as spam and ignore future contacts.
When have you seen people obfuscate their public social media contact addresses? I haven’t seen anyone hide their Twitter, FB public pages, or LinkedIn addresses. Email shouldn’t be any different for general contact purposes.
Now the one exception I have is work email addresses. I don’t publicize those.
charles@geuis.com
You never know what someone might do with that information I guess :)
Nothing wrong with being free. It can get you popularity like dropbox, robinhood etc
One of the most difficult thing in a SaaS is reaching to a customer in a cost-effective manner. It's common nowadays to have a CAC of $100+. So paid acquisition channels would be impossible if your prices are low.
If you already have a community or a user-base, then probably you can make a few hundred dollars out of it. But if you are starting from scratch, I would rather suggest going for a big idea instead of a smaller one because your marketing efforts in both the case would be almost same.
I agree that if you're trying to build a big business, you need to think hard about how you're going to get customers. But if you're just trying to make a couple hundred a month (as OP asked), it's a completely different ballgame. You just need a tiny sliver of an enormous pie.
1. In my experience B2B ideas are best for quick monetization compared to B2C.
2. Think of roadblocks you face creating your own site. Pretty sure somebody else will face them too (many great products were created out of this, readme.io, statuspage, etc)
3. Don't go all in. I never spend more than 2 weeks before submitting my project on PH, HN, mailing my list. Don't ever make the mistake of working on something for 2 years alone not telling anyone about it.
4. Don't reinvent the wheel. Ie don't waste time on things like your login page (HNs login page is a great example on how much it matters), hiring designers (a template from HTML5rocks or wrapbootstrap is just as good). A lot of these things (support, auth, chat, etc) are offered as Saas services and can be integrated directly to save you weeks in launch.
5. Marketing is where you want to spend most of your time since yoh ask about making money. Also don't be afraid of pricing. Read patio11 black art of saas pricing for an excellent guide. Learn content marketing, SEO, etc.
Good luck!
a) solve a slightly different problem
b) target different users
c) solve the problem in a 10x better, compelling way
Uniqueness will be added to the collective, so don't bother creating categories because that requires extra effort building validation from below zero and any new products coming along can execute much easier with the lessons and improvements of the "settlers."
It sounds more as if the commenter wanted to point out that it is better to outsource/Saas chat, login, design and the likes to some external service instead of wasting time on it initially.
With that said - I believe you have a point in what you stated. A lot of products came out as a better copy of another product.
As for good ideas, that’s the tricky part. Look around and open your ears... sorry for not letting you know of my exit plan idea ;-)
Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life.
I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren’t making money on it, versus building something brand new.
Build something that doesn't cost much to keep going and let it simmer at least 5x longer than you think. And, make copyright dates self-updating. ;) Furthermore, if it's not losing copious amounts of money, pivot, restructure it or sell it to somebody else.
Shutting down usually == disrespecting money.
Or they become slightly successful and abandon it, like they have self-harm tendencies.
I think in the next 5 years someone is going to invent an entire stack for long-lived apps. Where every level is as simple as possible and the only updates that are issued are security updates. We need computers to be able to run 30 year old software without having to stress, and the only way I can think of doing that is to minimize feature development and complexity.
With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.
You can of course buy Rails LTS (though from a quick glance the pricing can be very expensive if you have eg a deploy per tenant rather than multitenant). But gems move on from your version, apis change underneath you, etc.
Keeping a moderately complex rails using say 100 gems with okta + google SSO and various other integrations up and running on a permanent basis can easily consume 1/2 a ft engineer.
So if you're in possession of an app that earns say $150k/year, you have to decide if you want to put that half eng year in or if there are more productive ways to spend your time.
This is even more painful if you bet on, for example, a javascript framework that fell out of fashion.
People wildly overestimate technical risk and wildly underestimate gtm risk.
I have 3 side businesses that make between a few hundred and a few thousand per month. All 3 sat idle for months after completion as I groused about no revenue. When i stopped building the next thing long enough to sell the finished things it really wasnt a problem.
I have this problem myself. I've got a product that sells itself within its target market but the market is kind of niche so I have no idea how to get it in front of that audience. I tried Ad words but it seemed like a waste of money and didn't move the needle.
Where do you see these?
My question is on logistics: Adsense brings in a bit less than expenses. Many users have expressed interest in supporting the project financially. Any recommendations on services to let people do that? One person recommended Patreon but that seems more geared towards artists.
Want to save the map: $$$
Sync to GPS-nav device: $$$
Show places to eat with a rating: $$$
There are different approaches to achieve this, but finding a technique that is both comprehensive enough and time efficient is the challenge.
If you notice I start with the high-level design first rather than the code. I find I build a better tool/product doing that first and I often save time. Personally I find myself doing a lot of code churn if I start with the code.
2. Looks for apps which are poorly-rated (< 4 stars). These are apps which serves an actual need, but whose execution is lacking.
3. Build polished versions of those apps.
I would stay away from Reddit, personally.
If it helps people then let them try it and pay what they want for it, which tells you how much you're helping based on how much they are paying.
I guess it really depends on how much you value money vs having people use your software or other ancillary benefits.