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Ask HN: Which is the richest IT niche for a 2-3 years project?

39 points by DrNuke ↗ HN
I’ve just been asked this by a couple of young engineers in search of a new project for quick and good (€10+m) monetisation in, say, 2-3 years and starting now from scratch. I have put fintech cybersecurity forward as the most liquid and possibly the richest niche out there for a 3 years attempt. Any better tip? Thanks. EDIT: project starting from the EU.

48 comments

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napolux
PORN?
jonathankoren
Isn’t today’s porn industry essentially a low margin commodity business?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cableshaft
If you're making content or a site with content you've produced, it's probably very low margin at this point. If you're making a platform that can take everyone's content, there's probably still a lot of money to be made in it, if you have a new or compelling take on (because there's several big platforms now that most people go to, like most people just go to YouTube). Although that's true with everything, pretty much. Books, music, movies, video, etc.
jonathankoren
Yeah, but if you’re taking the aggregate / pirate approach, you now have a bunch of capital expenditures for streaming that much video, and the. Have the whole SEO / advertising budget. At least child porn can be outsourced (at least at first) to just downloading hashes from the NCMEC.
mtnGoat
definitely not this. unless you already have deep pockets.
ydnaclementine
I always wonder what is NSFW for developers to look at, at those type of companies
pxtail
Maybe VR porn with set of compatible ...accessories/devices. Add to it bitcoin or blockchain something something and voila!
mwj
LOL oh only 10 mill within 3 years... that is the holy grail of startups.
lj3
an AI driven VR product built on the blockchain.
codewritinfool
Nobody can answer this with certainty for you. If they could, who wouldn't be pursuing the same thing?
alex_duf
Not everyone is interested in high-risk high-reward projects
bdcravens
True, but OP sounded like they were looking for low-risk high-reward projects, at least how I read it.
durkie
maybe they need a name for this type of thing. something about getting rich, but quickly?
abakker
It's funny, but who isn't interested, right? lots of wealth and comfort in just 3 short years? sure, sign me up!
jonathanpeterwu
Fintech based AI services comes to mind, consumer fintech products seem to be having a moment in the EU with all the progress banking has had there vs here in the US.
lee101
I had some luck developing https://bitbank.nz an AI based crypto currency prediction platform, I do find that teaching AI can be a very hard subject to grasp for some but one of the most rewarding I'd say.

Lots of AI problems to solve in this space: anomaly detection to help understand risk, data collection/text mining to understand current trends in markets, clustering groups to find groups of for example high engaged users or people who should be shown ads instead of being pushed to pay for a product because they are likely not going to purchase ect

bdcravens
> I have put fintech cybersecurity forward as the most liquid and possibly the richest niche out there for a 3 years attempt.

Do you think "a couple of young engineers" can build that kind of expertise in 3 years?

wepple
+1

DrNuke, please reconsider what you’re doing here.

3 years is hardly enough to understand the cyber security problem space, let alone build useful products/solutions.

At best, they’ll fleece some unaware VCs, sell rubbish to companies via flashy PR, and exit or collapse.

This field is hard.

icedchai
They can probably build some snake oil in 3 years.
killyp
Wouldn't even take that long. I could throw together a flashy "antivirus" that looks really good and does nothing more than a simple file signature lookup in a month. I could probably also get some sales of it to small companies that don't know any better. But to be ground breaking in the cyber security world and build something that is the foundation of a new company is just not feasible in 3 years without massive help from VCs, which isn't going to happen without a PoC or connections.
segmondy
Really? There are tons of low hanging fruit in the security problem space that is all about adjusting user and developer behavior.
lurcio
In EU I like the growth prospects and environment for E-commerce - of course, riding the wave while differentiating from what Amazon is aiming to achieve...
claudiulodro
Since it doesn't sound like they have strong domain expertise in any area, I'm going to recommend eCommerce. If you can create a fad (e.g. fidget spinners, Razor scooters, ICO, etc.) and quickly capitalize on it that's going to be the quickest way to make $10mm+.

It's a heavily luck-based plan, but if there was a no-luck 3-year plan to making $10mm+ we would all be doing that instead of whatever we're doing now.

stcredzero
"No Luck 3 Year $10M" sounds like the new 4 Hour Work Week.
jarsin
Blockchain + AI + Bio Tech. Store young models DNA on blockchain. Then unleash an army of decentralized AI bots to discover eternal youth.

You can raise like 100 million by setting up a Wordpress site with the above idea.

fuddle
They may pick the right niche, but at the end of the day it's about the execution not the idea.
nickpsecurity
Port some FOSS they're already depending on a lot on OpenBSD on hardware you certified to work. Self-hosted machines and bare-metal servers from at least one third party. Charge for licensing (say "license") the binaries with support included while putting the modified source in a repo somewhere for the masses to benefit. Use money you don't keep as profit to repeat the process for more software. Alternatively, after an OpenBSD port, rewrite the same software in Rust with all checking on (eg integer overflow) plus thorough equivalence and fuzz testing. I chose these two because they have excellent documentation along with helpful folks that would probably love to help out any team actually making something like that happen with real, production-worthy, open-source code.

wepple is right about security requiring tons of knowledge and experience to do right in general. That said, even inexperienced programmers with no security knowledge can vastly reduce the number of hacks and downtime their customers deal with by following my recommendation to use safe languages with minimal or no runtimes on secure OS's. Obviously, there's stuff they'll miss that requires experienced folks to spot. So, bring in security consultants for reviews and/or do bounties early on when revenue is low or you're still on investment money. Then, as you grow enough to afford more people, hire at least one, security expert with lots of proven experience in avoiding and finding flaws in the type of software you're selling. They can also help with ports in between security reviews to get more ROI.

anonu
Go to the Craigslist front page and find an item you can build a company around. Here are ideas: http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5304ca1d6da811c54d9...
segmondy
might as well suggest for one to pick up a dictionary or yellow page and build a business around any random word they pick.
dagoat
Struggling to understand that logic. The only way I've been able to arrive at the same conclusion is if I pretend I don't know what a dictionary is, or what Craigslist's front page looks like. Or both
anonu
Craigslist is a marketplace. They brings two sides together in a transaction. However transaction costs are high. Primarily because there is no security or insurance.

The front page gives you a template for what types of marketplaces you can build and solve some of the transaction costs problems for users.

Dictionary is not going to be too helpful here.

zitterbewegung
If I recall correctly video games have the fastest turn around for a profitable startup . Understanding the space could be done in a few years .
rambojazz
Do they? I've always thought of games as "few make the millions, everyone else make zero".
servercobra
I'm pretty sure that's all startups though.

But video games do seem like something that can go from nothing to "product that lots of people pay for" pretty quickly, relative to a SaaS business or something similar.

lotyrin
Games, like music, culinary and other arts have greater-than-background levels of competition because many are drawn to them by artistic motives.
lj3
It depends. I've been looking a lot into this lately. There is still a middle market for video games. It's more difficult than it used to be to get noticed in that space, but it's far from impossible. Here's a GDC video about a small studio who created a downhill biking game that made $250k in revenue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWRu3RRqQmY

hahamrfunnyguy
Games are a hugley competitive space and gamers are very fickle. It's a lot harder to pivot a "product" that's purely for entertainment into something else that's profitable, since a lot of what goes into a game is content that wouldn't nessesarily port well to another endevaor.

There's a much safer opportunity the eduational games space where you could target schools/districts in the K-12 segment as well as selling direct to parents.

rambojazz
Wait a minute, let me take my crystal ball...
thisisrajat
Something related to digital nomads and remote work. If you crack this, you'll easily scale to $1M+ if not $10M+.
cosmon0t
A company that converts VC dollars into a decentralized, culturally immutable currency, preferably made of some sort of highly conductive, wear-resistant material that people will store and exchange for goods and services.
cellis
There's a way to do this: Look at the INC 5000 list and see which companies in IT were built in less than 3 years to X revenue.
segmondy
You don't search a project to make money, you figure out problem people are currently having, you solve it, provide value and get paid for it. Not that simple, but that's the way to approach you product. Begin with other people's problem not some speculative niche.