HN Explorer

Ask HN: I've got 3 months of long weekends. What should I build?

11 points by luke_s ↗ HN
Hey, My wife and kids are taking an extended trip overseas. I have organised to take 1 day a week of work so that I can spend some time on personal projects. My current idea is to try building 3 small projects, spending a month on each and blogging the results. Each project should:

* Be capable of producing a small, continuous income stream, with only minimal extra investment once it is complete.

* Be small enough to complete in a month of long weekends.

* Have some easily measured metric, that I can track, and use to iterate and improve my work (pageviews, downloads, purchases, etc)

* Require only a small upfront investment in cash.

As for my skills I have 10 years experience in software development, can design, write and take photos. The current projects I'm considering are:

1. 1 month of stock photography, uploaded to a site like http://www.istockphoto.com/

2. Creating themes for magento, or some other e-commerce or CMS platform

3. I have an existing website that sells products over the net ( http://www.grafting-tool.com/ ), however it gets very few customers. Spend a month trying to increase the pageviews and page rank.

4. Android application to allow people to sort through their photo collections on their phone.

5. A solution to link Google analytics conversion tracking with paypal buy now buttons. I spent ages working on this on my own website and there is no easy off the shelf solution.

What are peoples suggestions and experiences with side projects? Is there anything I should be looking at? Or avoiding?

I hope to share my experiences with HN, so in just over a month, I will have my first success, or failure to report.

Edit: formatting.

19 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] thread
matdwyer
First two seem over populated.

Third seems like a solid idea if your research shows there is potential there

Fourth also seems solid, but gotta look at your competition (and why wouldn't a big player do that?)

Fifth seems like a for sure if it meets a need you have found to be unaddressed...

luke_s
For the 4th option (android application to sort photos on phone), last time I looked (about a month ago) unfortunately, there was nothing. Specifically I'm after something that allows me to keep my photo library on my main PC, in something like adobe lightroom, or picassa, then flag and tag photos on your mobile. There are plenty of photo apps out for android, but nothing to help your organise your primary photo library, if its stored on a PC.
beck5
The first 4 seem a little unoriginal (perhaps that doesn't mean non profitable!)

The last option seems generally different and you may have found a small little niche which is going to be you goal. I would just work on that for one month then reassess.

luke_s
Hmmmm, that seems like solid advice. I think google analytics to Paypal buy now button integration is something people would pay $20 to $30 for, if it was a simple .php file people could drop into their web server.

Some sort of hosted solution would possibly be easier for people to use, but then I would have to charge a subscription fee. But then, people using paypal buy now buttons are generally too tight to pay for a proper hosted shopping cart or hosted e-commerce platform (I should know :)

toumhi
I vote for 3. You already have a product that you need to promote. However, boosting your page rank? Page rank is 4 and you're already number 1 in google for "grafting tool". Are you sure you have a pageview and pagerank problem?

Maybe you want to rank for gardening tools as well? Create some content on the website to increase your ranking for long tail keywords, and participate in gardening forums and communities would be a start (building backlinks at the same time).

luke_s
Thanks for the feedback! But are you sure your not just seeing me as number 1, with your own personal google goggles? When I search from a new browser, with no cookies I actually appear down the bottom of the 1st page. At least here in Australia. Where are you located?

As for PR 4 - wow! When did that happen. Last time I checked it was a big fat 0. Guess google has updated their index.

toumhi
Ah yeah, could be. I'm currently in Vietnam. Through my VPN in UK you also show up as number 1. How can a website hosted in Australia shows up higher in Vietnam and UK than Australia? Except if competition for grafting tools is fierce down under, of course ;-)
Dramatize
Showing up #1 for me too :)

Where in Australia are you based?

luke_s
Melbourne.

Well, this certainly makes me re-think my strategy. Here I was thinking I was getting no hits, because I was down the bottom of the search results, while it turns out I am #1 across most of the world!

Unfortunately pageviews and conversions are still terrible. I just need to figure out what to do about it.

Dramatize
There was a refresh in Pagerank a few days ago.

Maybe turn the front page into a longer form sales pitch? How many sales are you doing?

luke_s
At the moment: not many sales at all. My last one was 3 weeks ago to the day! However its very seasonal - during winter in the northern hemisphere, I will get 1 or 2 a week.

Thanks for the suggestion on the front page.

keeptrying
You need to figure out who will pay you money. To do that you need to go talk to clients. Thats the hard part. Ie figuring out the problem.

Implementation is straightforward because you already have a timeline for it. :) (Seriously!)

Steps: * choose your best 3 ideas

* create mockups for each

* find customers for them - linkedin, twitter, blogs, google, your fb friends.

* interview them and see if they will pay for a solution.

* select your strongest idea

* tweak it with feedback

* Implement a simple solution and iterate

Dont be surprised if by the end of the month youve just looped through all these steps!

luke_s
Hmmm, I think options 4 (android photo management app) and 5 (Paypal to google analytics integration) would be very well suited for that approach. Perhaps I should spend the 1st month on one of the other options, while trying to talk to potential customers for option 4 or 5 as a background task.
keeptrying
Focus on one. Focus on the one that will have immediate users. (You'll hate working on an app with no users.) And one that people will pay to use. (Because thats your goal.)

Best of luck.

thenomad
The fifth - isn't that a simple "onClick" event? Or are you doing something more interesting and complex?
luke_s
If only it was that simple! Last time I checked, there were several solutions to integrating buy now buttons with google analytics conversion tracking. Each one 'almost' works, but fails to track some percentage of conversions. The net is littered with posts from people trying to solve the problem.

The 'correct' solution, is that paypal can callback to a URL at your site with details of any completed transactions. You need to run a script at that URL, that will put HTTP request through to googles tracking servers, pretending to be the customer. The trick is matching up the information received back from paypal, with the customers browsing the site and spoofing the request to googles tracking servers.

I believe a consultant wrote a blog somewhere explaining how he implemented it for a client. When I looked it, it would take about 3 or 4 days of effort to code up a solution.

Polat
I vote for 2.

If you are able to create an original theme that offers something new to designers and developers (who are the main customers of premium themes) you can make thousands of dollars in only a couple months. Study the themes with several sales to see what they have in common and incorporate those things into your own theme.

It's also a great opportunity to find customers looking for support and outsourcing.

luke_s
Really. This is very interesting - it definitely goes against the grain of what other commenter are saying. Don't you think the theme market is over saturated?
vp3
#1, 2 & 4