Ask HN: How to come up with side project ideas

(Not an expert.)

I've learnt from HN that the most valuable thing in improving your software is watching how people use it. Not being told about that or reading about it, but actually observing.

So maybe watching people in various walks of life, seeing what problems they actually have, will be more valuable than any amount of reading about it or they telling you.

At first I was thinking that to get such access you could say you're making a documentary or writing a book/article about something, but maybe the truth would be fine here, since the goal is to help them and their field. Ah although you say it has to make money for you. Maybe focus on the helping first?

Another approach is build a community around a topic. This is very open ended and could be a mailing list, a subreddit, a slack channel etc. Once you have done this, you might find out about people's problems. As the lead of the community you might get more insight into this than anyone else.

Two suggestions come to mind:

- Check side-project directories for inspiration! For example you can check: https://profithunt.co/

- Find an old idea/startup and try to make it better in some way! Sometimes we try hard to find novel ideas, but making an old idea better, is more rewarding actually.

Read this: https://www.indiehackers.com/start

The mantra is to find a problem [you're passionate about] and solve it for a small group of initial users.

A corollary is to find an emerging technology and make it easy to use or make something related that doesn't currently exist. I say it's a corollary because I assume that whoever is working on the new technology has found a problem and is trying to solve it.

Speaking about myself, I was interested in two-factor authentication and security keys. A couple years ago I saw an opportunity in FIDO2 [I was betting on a hopefully growing technology] as there was no open source FIDO2 security key.

With a group of friends we decided to make SoloKeys [1]. I guess in our case we decided to make it a company vs a side project, but that's just the amount of commitment.

Fast forward 1.5y, FIDO2 is implemented on all browser including mobile safari on iphone and Microsoft is pushing FIDO2 a lot. So I guess the bet was good so far.

This is a long story to say that maybe it's hard to think to a problem, but maybe you can find a technology (that someone else developed to solve a problem) and you can be part of that ecosystem. Best of luck!

[1] https://solokeys.com

1) Pick a problem, look at existing solutions and think if it's possible to slim any of them down (to the basics) and charge a lower fee for it. An analogy would be that people only use a small set of features in MS Word but new versions are released and then you have to pay a heftier amount for that newer version.

2) Since you're in tech/software, are there any problems that multiple friends/family members have asked you to solve for them? Can you write software for that?

3) Keep an eye out for news outside of the US/Europe. Are there common problems that people in those other locations are having? Can you automate or solve any of them.

All of the above (and more) is what led to our building - RetailingPlatform - https://retailingplatform.com

A few weeks ago was a post on Hacker News by Peter Askew how he created his projects based on expiring domains. You can check which domains are expiring, buy one and turn it into a project. You may also just use the list of expiring domains as inspiration.

Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235671

My side project when I was a teacher was https://officesnapshots.com and it has been my full-time work for 7-8 years.

A place I’ve found to be good for idea hunting is the website for the city I live in which has all sorts of interesting and useful information that is often organized horribly or hard to find.

One example was that they published crime statistics organized in a table by the types of crime and district. On a separate page in a pdf was a map that showed the boundaries for each district.

My idea and project was to create a map where you could see where in town particular types of crime happened most.

Based on that idea, my office mate came up with the idea (though not implemented) to find data about bike accidents and map them to streets to see if there were any hotspots that might be particularly dangerous for cycling.

Ideas seem kind of iterative so once I have one idea and expertise in that area, I can’t help but think about other similar problems to solve with my new knowledge.

An example is that because my main job is based around organizing architecture projects and photos, I noticed that during the process of planning my wedding it could be interesting to have a website filled with bouquets organized by the flowers that are in them.

While not a successful business, I learned some new things and ended up implementing concepts to my main business.