Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

1) Learn the tools to build your product.

2) Research some product / markets, see what other products are out there. Chasing some noble idea, or "hidden gem" just to gain first-move advantage isn't all that, IMO. It's almost always better to join an existing market where proof of concept has already been done for you. Even better if the existing products are stagnant or lacking.

3) Figure out a business and marketing plan, doesn't have to be the most complex thing in the world - but it forces you to do some research before just diving into something blindly.

4) Start developing your MVP. Reach out to users in the relevant places, which means going to forums, twitter, subreddits, etc. Try your best to get user feedback, iterate your product on said feedback. Any money you get from donations, purchases, gifts, family, whatever should go towards infrastructure and marketing.

5) With enough users, look into how you want to monetize your product. Ads? SaaS? Purchases? Lots of ways, but they all have their pros and cons.

But, to be honest, it's a lot of work for a single developer. Especially if you're not already experienced with all the various aspects. You're basically gonna be doing everything on a smaller scale. Lots of things to learn, lots of things that can go wrong.

And importantly, it can take years to build up a userbase large enough to live off the project. Sometimes you never grow to that size, and the product life-cycle has peaked, on its way downwards.

The people that do this kind of stuff, have tried and failed multiple times before. But there's always something to learn, which you'll take to the next project.

Depending on your disabilities it may be a tough road. The common wisdom is that most businesses fail — it takes a lot of skill, creativity, luck, and hard work to make a business that generates income, even for people without disabilities. I would say if money is your sole objective you might be better off doing light contracting work.

For generating business ideas, you might look at this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen. He lists a lot of the pitfalls about business ideas he's seen when interviewing indie hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

You might also want to limit your idea generation to businesses that will reliably generate income month-to-month (if that's important to you). And if you want it to be lucrative you might consider a business that solves problems for other businesses (since they tend to have money and are willing to spend it if your service is valuable — it can be hard for consumer apps to be very lucrative).

One thing I learned as someone with limited abilities is that it helps to be very clear about your own goals and spend some time thinking about a roadmap of what tasks (marketing, developing, etc) will help get you there. This is so you can minimize wasted time and effort, which is extra precious when you're limited.

I made https://extensionpay.com and it generates a couple hundred dollars a month with very little ongoing effort. It also helps other developers generate revenue from their browser extensions, so that gives me a good feeling.

This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.

I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.

You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.

If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.

The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)

The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.

And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.

I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.

Organic channels are your lifesavers, the ones which will make your microstartup successful, so start working on them from day 1.

I have few things planned for 2022.

* I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build

* I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it.

* I do a public launch in IH, PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit. In few weeks if I reach the goal that I set at the beginning, then I continue working on it to improve. If not then I will drop it and move on the next.

You have objective in making this choice, most people cling on to the sentiment.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.