Ask HN: What are 100K dollar ideas but not million dollar ideas?
Forget about billion dollar ideas, I am not even interested in working on million dollar ideas. There are multiple ideas or projects which are left because they don't have potential to scale. They are very specific to a niche set of customers or teams. Many people wanted to work on the solution but dropped off as they had bigger fishes to fry or knew the idea wouldn't scale. But the idea would scale up to a certain limit.
e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/
I believe that every village needs to solve their own problem and and may be in a different way(based upon the resources they have) as the external help may not arrive. The solution also need not go to cities as it is very specific to the village. This man got a project working after passing the initial inertia. His company may not scale beyond a certain limit but I guess that's okay.
What do you think would be those kind of ideas?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadI've been designing and building audio software and hardware components for musicians since I was a teenager. VST plugins to start, then moved on to digital guitar effects and now Eurorack synth modules. I've also built custom midi controllers, traditional guitar pedals, you name it, I've designed and built it.
I have absolutely no doubt that I could build a small, semi-successful company around these products, that would turn over 200-300k per year, with a nice profit margin. In fact, I've made quite detailed business models which make me very confident in that.
My problem, however, is that I am extremely well employed (like probably many other readers here :) and that just won't compete with my current paycheck; which also comes with job security, low stress, and vacation days (I'm on the UK). These ideas would also be very difficult or impossible to grow into million dollar+ annual sales, as they are targeted at very niche audiences.
So I've been stuck in this half-way place, where I have a bunch of products, mostly finished, even polished (and I work on this stuff because I LOVE doing it, that's the only reason), and every time I have to make a decision whether to open source it and give it away or try to monetise it. So far, it's all gone the open source way, but I have a couple of projects I'm holding back because I think I might be able to sell them to another company for a decent amount.
Thinking about all those meta/alphabet/twitter employees being let go these days, I wouldn't be surprised if we're about to see an explosion in cool, scrappy tech startups, from people who've been in my situation, and decided to use this as an opportunity to build their little dream startup - I hope so!
However ... getting deep into DSP is another thing!
Also, you might want to checkout CLAP rather than VST https://cleveraudio.org/
As long as you're not unhappy with your day job, that's great. If you are unhappy, then you have a passion project/domain that you already have good progress in.
It's easy to give advice, so I'll give some. Make a 6 month plan toward quitting your day job (reducing financial burdens, winding down unnecessary expenses, generally preparing for no income). Make some potential plans for how you might fill your days with regard to your audio work. If you don't do this step, you may find yourself feeling lost or aimless and consequently not as happy as you would have expected.
But here's the best part, I think: start using some of your free time to go to conferences and shows where audio tech is a feature. Show some of your stuff, or at least talk to others about it. Where this could lead is vast and somewhat unpredictable, but it might be a lot of fun and it likely could lead to something solid.
Meanwhile, focus on one or two of your projects and try to get them polished enough to setup a storefront and promote (assuming you're not already doing this).
Maybe it never reaches your current job income, but it might get close enough that you decide it was worth it. And if not, there will always be more jobs waiting.
Now I think I do:
1. Those engineers will less likely to upend the apple cart by inventing something that could disrupt business 2. Those engineers will be kept away from competition, where they could do something to help competition
Those tech workers are sufficiently happy that leaving is typically not an optimal choice.
FWIW, I am just typing aloud. So please correct me if you see a flaw in that reasoning.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-ceo-unve...
Don't you think this will give people like you (especially those not well connected) more granular insight to take the decisions they are hesitant about?
Personally. I'm just curious. I've been using VSTs for 20 years, and I find this power fascinating. So, I'm intrigued by all the human and market dynamics behind the scenes that make it possible.
Sadly, in our current system, less economic growth = less money is given to musicians = less money musicians give to tool creators. This may not even be a linear chain, so the effect get a whole worse at the end point (if you know what I mean)
Same thing with medical tech, energy tech, etc.
Web and to some extent games are a lot more open (and larger) than most fields
There's a little bit of this on the Valhalla blog[1] IIRC (great reading if you're into DSP tech). You might also find pieces of insight by looking at some of the hackaday posts or by looking at some of the DIY Synth groups on facebook etc. There's definitely some interesting stories there of Kickstarters that over-promise and under-deliver (late/buggy/etc), ISLA Kordbot[2] springs to mind as an example that was a long wait, as well as some darlings like the Oxi One[3]. Perhaps reading Kickstarter comments and the associated forum posts could be a viable strategy for getting more into this field.
[1]: https://valhalladsp.com/blog/
[2]: https://www.islainstruments.com/product/kordbot/
[3]: https://oxiinstruments.com/
My startup on which we poured 3 years of work by 10 people, failed to ever earn back the money spent on it.
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to sell and how fleeting can success be.
I believe that coming up with product ideas that can work at the indie level (bootstrapped/without raising millions) is a matter of training, validating the idea is the hardest part (and not falling into the trap of building it first). The main target of those ideas is often something that can sustain you with under a hundred customers, which rules out building a new social network.
One idea I had recently is on the edge of consumers and businesses: it might make sense to have groupon-like websites for niches. These could be geographical, or around a certain activity. For instance if you are into craft beer, why not create a "deal" website for it? Call up shops that sell brewing equipment, walk in to local bars and ask if they would like to come up with some craft beer tasting event. The model is here that you get a kickback if people take you up on your offers. The more niche the better.. It could be as specific as "young parents who love craft beer and live in New York". That sounds like it could be in the 100k range.
A small plug, for fun I've been writing up some ideas that fit this description [0].
[0]: https://indieideas.substack.com/archive?sort=new
Out of interest, what makes you think there's still money left on the table in this domain, given all the existing products? Or rather, what do you feel all the existing products lack?
There's always underserved customers that are somehow dissatisfied.
In any given city there may be lots of dry cleaners available. Some will be much better than others (service, performance, etc.). Some will be much cheaper than others. Some may be the perfect combination of all these things.
Unfortunately, we often don't know where the best one is. And perhaps because of another person's suggestion "affiliate marketing", it is now virtually impossible to search online to get actual reviews of things (as there are now more SEO-d review sites which are just thinly veiled affiliate marketing sites).
So we use the service we see nearby or stumble upon. It may not be the best, but we don't really know better.
The same applies to so many things in life, business or otherwise (people, friends, relationships). Thus, yet-another-monitoring-service can succeed if it gets enough customers, even if there are much better services out there.
What’s this alluding to?
There are definitely companies with toxic high-stress engineering environments, but workers with valued skills have the employment capital to just… opt out. If all you care about is coasting at an average salary, you can either refuse to engage with the stressful parts of the job, or get another job. You get fired? Oh well, on to the next job.
I’ve worked in jobs where I had stressed co-workers who felt like the future of the company was on their shoulders… and co-workers, on the same team, who didn’t have a care in the world, because they understood that the success of the company was not linked to how stressed they were or how many hours they worked. Their value to the company was equal, their quality of life was vastly different.
If all you want is $100k/year, and you have the skill set to build your own company, you have the skill set to get a job where you don’t have to break a sweat. There are lots of companies out there who know how to realise >$100k value from an employee in 30 hours of low-stress work per week.
The whole notion of needing a career is self imposed, it’s a choice, if you’re happy making an average salary you don’t need to be in a high stress environment.
In other words, I see my company spend millions a month on AWS fees. If they wanna bump my salary considerably, then I would consider putting in more hours. But until that day comes, work life balance is my number one priority.
I once had such a job and it was horrible: I worked as an amazon warehouse associate, basically just receiving packages, sorting items, putting a barcode with asin on it, done. Loop this for 8 hours plus some additional pressure from team leads.
In the evening I didn’t even have the energy left to have any kind of “life“; and I really hated that job, so it was even more exhausting and tiring.
Now I have a job which really fulfills me, and I don’t even see it as work anymore. I have no issue with staying late, and I actually want to stay late often in order to get my stuff done; also still working at home and researching stuff in my free time. But now I don’t really have this clear border what some call work-life balance.
My opinion might not be agreeable for everyone, but maybe this viewpoint helps someone else.
Additionally, because spending your time just working for a company is fucking miserable. If you have stuff that needs to be done still, that's a management failure, not your problem. These are all hours wasted on not seeing family, friends, enjoying other things, broadening your horizon.
I'm not calling for "come in at 8, clock out at 5 and fuck off", but spending more than a single additional evening for work is proof of terrible management and a straight up insult to your free time.
Above $1B, you can’t avoid having your name in the press, so that may increase stress on both you and your family.
But when having to choose between 100k and keeping your head down and 100k and keeping your head high, I know what I would choose. Of course the latter comes with more initial stress and risk so you have to know what you want.
Running your own business is stressful. It requires a level of organization apart from the skills you need to make a viable and successful product. It is not a common combination.
I guess I would not automatically equate "keeping head up high" = running your own business. I assure you even when you run your own business, you have people to answer to.
Oh, for sure not. Depending on your customers and your money flow, it can also mean keeping your head very low to not loose the last contracts. And there are probably some companies, where you can keep your head high or are even encouraged to do so and no sociopath from management bites your head off for it, but values your opinion.
Do you know of a good site that focuses on browser extension reviews and discussions? I now realize I could probably find things which would improve my life, but I don't feel like doing a random walk through the general extension page of Firefox.
For example, "when I get in the car and it is after 6pm but before 9pm and the car is headed west on the 401, text my wife that I just got on the highway and I'm headed home."
Charge $8k per month. Someone will take you up on it.
This will remain small because the profitable real estate is locked but it could be an option for the remaining small venues.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33666013
There are currently 200 founders making $1.6M per month with their solo startups.
But also, you can read Q&A-s with the founders about how they started, got their first customers, etc.
I’m not singling you out, since this happens allllllll the time, but I truly wish you or anyone could articulate why you thought it would be helpful to share something that was by definition unhelpful or “off topic”.
Truly breaks my brain trying to fathom this behavior.
And in the IT space, your competition is companies like Lockheed Martin... Although you might have a leg up if your company is veteran-, woman-, or minority owned, see Offices of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization.
I own a handful of profitable small online businesses and I’m building another in my spare time. You can tell by my user name where a lot of opportunity for small time programmers are (crypto in general really) but HN is ideologically opposed to that industry despite the profit opportunities being massive.
And finally I don’t want to reveal any here because I believe Peter Thiel when he writes that “every business has a secret”. On the surface level they are selling XYZ but the reason they win in a competitive market is only known to those running it.
In the traditional space I had a fairly profitable tool that was for a puzzle-like F2P game (think similar to Words with Friends) that ranked highly on Google. That was ad supported but the hardcore players of the game would use it. I wound up selling it for $5k on an app flipper website when the traffic started to decline as the game got older.
more of a socio-economic observation but it's a problem that needs solving for each village - the current solution is government subsidy from urban areas to pay for care workers and pharmacy to drive around all day in the countryside to see people for a few mins each
I'm thinking if each rich old person in the village paid a subscription for a dedicated local care team who lived together in a nice house in the village (like 30x people paying £1000 a month to support 5 people) then that would be a balance for a very decent care wage + consistent high quality care
I think it could be as simple as a few standardised processes and contracts. If a village wants to try it they follow the steps and set it up themselves
And also the aging demographics, leaving fewer and fewer younger age people to support more and more older people.
>I'm thinking if each rich old person in the village paid a subscription for a dedicated local care team who lived together in a nice house in the village (like 30x people paying £1000 a month to support 5 people) then that would be a balance for a very decent care wage + consistent high quality care
What is your basis for thinking 5 people would have the expertise to support 30 old people, and they would do it for 6k pounds per month each, and live in a single house together?
I highly doubt that a person would go through years of grueling medical training to live that lifestyle.
most care staff are on £12 an hour where I live
a care home ratio of 1 staff to 6 members is good, (1 nurse + 3 carers to 30 people is not uncommon for a shift)
I think there's a lot of small-medium sized websites that fall into such a category.
- https://words.hk - if you haven't heard of this yet, probably because the site is in Cantonese (yeah, this is a novel thing, a Cantonese-Cantonese dictionary...)
- https://cantowords.com - This is an English version recently launched this year. The page rank or whatever SEO thing isn't up to speed yet, so there's not a lot of page views for this one yet.
And good luck with your business!
That would be P/S (price to sales), not P/E (price to earnings/profits). Not sure about web stuff, but for other small businesses no one would pay anywhere close to 10x P/S (or P/E for that matter but profits are more valuable than revenue).
Your question implies you are looking for tech ideas and your skills are in building software or services. The other side is applying high tech to areas of business that aren't very high tech at the moment - think about all the small or local businesses that still thrive that can barely get a website together and couldn't afford to hire a decent developer or even have the skills to manage a software project - if tech can improve that business you can differentiate yourself.
A website where you can print aftermarket gaskets on demand, and even do it with CAD files or derive them from edge detection in photos would make its money by shipping faster than OEMs, and without worrying about inventory. Retooling an existing custom sticker printing business would do it. Unit margins are like 100x the cost of the paper, and shipping cost margin is the other one.
I hit on the idea when my wife bought a vinyl cutter, which is basically a 2D plotter with a knife instead of a pen. I don't know if anyone makes an affordable cutter that can cut through gaskets (the material is thick and full of knife-dulling materials like fiberglass, metal, and carbon) but if they do, this is a totally doable business. I envision a web site where users can select an existing gasket from their database and have it cut and shipped. Or, if the gasket they want isn't yet in the system, they can draw it out using a vector tool (perhaps tracing over an uploaded photo or scanned image of the gasket). Select the material, provide credit card info and shipping address, and you get a gasket in a week or less.
I wouldn't mind working with someone on this. My strong suit is not coding but I'm okay at project management, research, and architectural stuff. If anyone is interested in chatting about it, feel free to contact me.
The tools generally used are "flash cutters"[1] (the industrial version of your wife's vinyl cutter); waterjet cutters; or laser cutters. They're all CNC controlled. You need a DXF or other vector file to send to these machines. They're often quite user-friendly now, with either projectors or cameras to help position the cuts on the workpiece, and vacuum-beds which make holding down material quick and easy.
[1] https://cutting-systems.co.uk/flashcut-flex-series-2/
SendCutSend (and probably others) do laser cutting on gasket grade cork and ship orders relatively quickly. You could probably use them as your fulfillment system, leaving you the work to make the gasket database and website. More work or a more expensive fulfillment service would be needed to brand your orders.
They also make all sorts of stuff out of various metals, paint the metals, thread them, etc. They have greatly expanded my capabilities as a hobbyist who is not a machinist.
One the fulfilment side, gaskets can be laser cut, and there are services which offer this on demand. Batching up multiple orders into a sheet would make it more cost efficient, along with always printing Nx the required amount and then stock the rest.
Once you've got the structure and interface right, start customizing according to requirements. Does a rural area run on delivered kerosene and propane? Schedule deliveries to customers according to the local temperatures and a per-client adjustment reflecting their historical usage.
Most of all, make it easy and obvious for your clients to use every day. Talk to them about their professional networks -- is there a forum or a mailing list where they discuss the business side? Get mentioned, get recommended. Be easy to talk to.
If anybody non-technical is interested in partnering with me (technical) on this, my forwarding email's in my profile.
Huh, I basically just spent my entire week working on this for our bakery (and the last 6 months on other software and systems like recipe management, team messaging, online sales, social marketing and more). We're using Odoo which has a lot of the pieces already there, I need need to write a few custom modules to link them up and make them bakery specific.
While I've been doing this, I've been thinking about how most small businesses couldn't do this. Partly technical know-how. But on a deeper level, they wouldn't even think about it, because a lot of people who run small businesses like bakeries are not technical and don't want to be and they can't afford to hire someone who is. And I've been wondering how to solve that problem - or if I'd want to, because as you say, it's not a million dollar idea. But it is an empowering idea for small businesses everywhere.
I guess I'm talking about one step above that, for example when a business grows beyond a single shop with just a couple of staff. At this point the you'll have an accountant and pos software and so on and inaccurately reporting stock or sales would actually take quite a bit of effort. Your staff would have to be in on it, for example. And staff that know you are dishonest are more likely to decide that they can be dishonest too, after all if the business is cheating the government surely it's ok if they cheat the business just a little bit? Overall I think it's not worth it and it's not the kind of business we want to run. I'd rather find extra efficiency elsewhere.
It could be that efficiency -- usually oven space or mixer capacity -- causes them to make it in lots of, say, 50 loaves. If they make one lot and sell out, they make two lots -- but if the second lot doesn't sell out, they go back to making one lot a day. Better to be in demand than taking a loss on unsold product.
More like, the company is willing to pay more but won't do so until the worker asks for a raise, in my personal experience.
If you're talking web agencies or subcontractors, that make more sense, as the client is paying for the waste, regardless.
I am the creator of 2bored2wait [0], a proxy that does stuff that is useful if you are a regular player on the minecraft server 2b2t.org. the current implementation is buggy, slow, in javascript and has a lot of tech debt.
An interesting fact about 2b2t is that because it is an anarchy server, it has not rules against using cheats and players won't get banned for using them. This means that there is a subset of players with too much money that likes to spend it on some flavor of paid hacked clients, some with monthly subscription.
I think there is a business somewhere to rewrite 2bored2wait in a faster language, integrate it well in a hacked client and/or as a service and sell that for a monthly fee or whatever, but i haven't even had the drive to do it for the sake of open source, even less so for creating a saas product that at most 100 people would use.
* Architecture - Most people writing code cannot plan, write, or envision an original solution to something wildly ambitious. This takes practice and with enough practice it gets comfortable and easy, but most people writing code will never get to that point. A mastery of architecture is possibly the only way to produce a superior product compared to the competition provided that business requirements remain unchanged.
* Performance - Astonishingly most people never measure anything unless they are forced to. Learning to measure things (everything) is a cognitive skill and the result is the difference between a 2 hour work day and an 8 hour work day. Measuring things is also the only way to write fast software, because everything else is guessing (and probably guessing wrong by several orders of magnitude). At the end of the day performance is not about how fast something this, but how much faster it is than something else.
* Writing, especially bridging the gap between technical writing and narrative writing for common people.
The target markets haven't increased in size, unless you're in developing countries with upwardly mobile populations.
So more affiliate marketers just means more duplication of noise, with everyone gaming ways to get the same business (or direct the same business to your companies).
If I have to watch another NordVPN ad baked into a youtube video, ...
Seems like the perfect job for a entrepreneurial student or retiree. Would be hard to scale though unless you built up a crew of people doing it.