Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
As I keep hearing about the tech layoffs, I can't help but think about starting a side hustle. But I have no idea how to find the right niche nor project idea.
So how did you folks do it?
218 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadWhen I was about 25, I saw a 40 year old man get fired. I swore I'd never care if I got fired. Seems similar to your epiphany.
The right niche or project idea is:
1. You know where to find the customers 2. You know the customers pay for similar projects 3. You can build what the customers pay for
Example: "I always forget about things I bookmarked on Twitter"
Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks (https://getbirdfeeder.com). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers.
>Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks (https://getbirdfeeder.com). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers.
This is fantastic. I'm gonna check it out.
Maybe people working in the media or that however somehow monetize their twitter use?
PS: I'm not a Twitter user, but I'm familiar with the topic.
Anyway my point is I also have a hard time (even now) believing people would pay for such a thing... Which is probably why none of my side projects have turned into a successful business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I sure have some bookmarks I never remembered to look at again.
Our main goal is to streamline curation and consumption process. Apart from bookmarks digest, it can also connect to third party apps part of creative workflow. Right now, we have one-for Notion to auto-sync bookmarks and for Zotero to auto-sync research papers when research scholar bookmark a tweet with a journal/research paper in it.
My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that:
1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,
2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements;
3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API — basically developer-adjacent functionality.) [^1]
I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.
[^1]: People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.
I higly agree with simplicity and decluterring projects to provide a real, but simple value.
I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no 'big bang' where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.
This is a strong _advantage_ of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017—2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn't drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn't going viral or spending money on ads.
Which makes me wonder – maybe a simple, overlooked way, to start side hustles is to replicate a service, but offer better pricing that works for niche/bootstrapped contributors, as opposed to creating niche versions of the service?
How to get and evaluate startup ideas[0]
There are a lot of different ways to think about this -- but generally what seems to be the pattern is:
- Get in a problem-finding mindset (generate value by solving problems). Problems are absolutely everywhere in society
- Qualifying problems is more important than having them (is this a problem people would pay to solve? Are there enough of those people?)
- Validating problems is more important than having them (is there any signal indicating people will? Has anyone actually given you money to solve this problem?)
keep in mind the idea is not the most important bit.
As far as doing #1 (getting you in the mindset), it really depends on what your goals are (don't let anyone tell you that "making money" is not a worthwhile goal), but in general one of the best practical things you can do is start running with an entrepreneurial crowd.
If you can't find a gaggle of entrepreneurs in meatspace, try sites like MicroConf, IndieHackers (read stories of other IndieHackers) and others. Start listening to podcasts that are by/for entrepreneurs (beware of get rich quick schemes obviously).
I literally write and send my ideas to people every week[1], trust me that when you start looking/thinking about startup ideas, they are everywhere. I have over 600 notes from what has to be less than 3 years of starting to write them down.
Personally what works for me is to:
- Go through life, witness something painful/weird/broken
- Have an idea of how you could solve/streamline that or think about what might be interesting to look into as a leverage point (maybe you can't solve it, but why is X like that?)
- Write it down
- Review the idea at a later date when you actually want to execute on something, start fleshing it out by adding research and trying to find your customer/talk to them.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg
[1]: https://unvalidatedideas.com/archive
I like how you commercialize it. Those ads are so relevant I went through some posts just for them and found 2 podcasts I think I'll enjoy.
You’re gonna love the ads in the next one — it’s one of the more relevant ones.
Also seeing that you liked the recommendation I’m going to start erring on putting more in there for podcasts and other resources, thanks for noting this
This was around 2015, I landed on a JavaScript image cropper and uploader. I built my own and have been working on it ever since.
Moved to sell the product on my own website under my own terms and by now I’m at $20K+ per month revenue, which is pretty crazy.
I try to write a lot of articles on web dev topics on my blog.
Additionally I built an open source file upload library (FilePond) which kind of acts as a stepping stone to the image editing solution. Easier to attract developers with a good free product. :)
Finally I’ve moved into offering free services that utilize the editor I built, I try to launch these on easy to remember domain names. They act as a demo of what the editor can do and they feature i tiny “powered by” link at the top.
- Why Gumroad instead of Stripe/Paddle?
- How do you enforce licenses? Once they have the JS they can just stop paying?
- Back when I started I didn’t have a backend for customer accounts so it was useful that Gumroad handled that. Can upload a file and then allow access to active subscribers. Paddle didn’t, Stripe doesn’t handle EU VAT nonsense.
- I don’t. Pirates gonna Pirate. Customers have access to the last version released within their subscription period, license is perpetual.
I wanted to make my own but ended up making a timeline maker and have kept working on it since (markwhen.com)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565
You don't need advanced tools to journal or write. But the practice of writing is organised thinking and you should try think of things that you're good at. You'll improve your thinking.
I do this everyday and I'm up to 700 ideas and 25 startup ideas. They're linked on my profile.
I can probably come up with 700 ideas in a day, but that's not what OP is asking.
Mathematics, computer science, business, civilization and society advances one idea at a time. You could be part of that too.
If you're expecting me to tell you how you should earn money then I'd tell you to do some work.
part of that work is coming up with ideas. I share mine. It takes effort.
The journaling of ideas is a good idea if you are taking the long view of this process. I have a paper day-planer/notebook that I carry with me and constantly list ideas, but only right as they appear. Certain types of ideas will only come to you in the moment when, at a place, or just thinking about stuff in a new way. It’s best to capture it as you have them.
So I have ideas (100 headings), ideas2(101 headings), ideas3 (101 headings) ideas4 (518 headings)
When I get to 100-500 ideas in that Markdown file I create a new repository. I use the hidden GitHub table of contents feature in the top left of the README.md.
I link to previous ideas where there is synergy.
This is so that when they are published to HN or Reddit people who saw previous issues do not skip over ideas added since last time.
Yeah, it takes a lot of perseverance to get a startup going. (Or rather, a lifestyle business in my case -- it's not a rocket ship, but I get to work on interesting things and interact with friendly customers, so it really is a great job.)
You can check out my SHOW HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808
The idea came at the intersection on what I can write about and where I have credentials (since I didn't really have any audience).
The uniqueness of my book is that it shows everything without higher level tools.
Build your network - The next thing is that you may have experienced a set of problems in your personal life or work but that set of problems may not be intersecting the set of problems you are suited to solve. It's worthwhile to get in touch with other people and ideally understand their business problems in particular. If you can identify and validate a business problem then you are almost there since you now have a short list of potential future customers or consulting clients, what have you.
Cultivate your solution space - You can start right away at identifying a niche of solution space you are a candidate to solve and try to keep getting better at that space so that you can be on the lookout for intersection between your capabilities and an interesting problem you validate.
Another important note is to be able to discern what is a promising problem and also not what YC calls "tarpit" problems. Tarpit problems are usually in the consumer space and are problems that everyone has like "I can't find a good restaurant" but in fact many projects have come and gone but it's hard to realize because the skeletons of have sunk into the tarpit.
EDIT: to answer original question.
For me personally it had to do with maintaining networks of people I had worked with in the past in order to get exposed to business problems that I wasn't aware of.
Sometimes it's just better to build something that already exists, but in a way that you would like to use it. We're currently at about $3500 MRR, maybe. It's a bit hard to tell because we have SaaS customers and customers receiving invoices.
I hope we can turn this into our full-time jobs soon.
You can read the full story here: https://pirsch.io/blog/introduction/
I’m not saying this is a sustainable model. But you don’t need to have ground breaking ideas more than a couple of times in your life. And people are already putting themselves under that kind of pressure, with nothing to show for it other than the week’s pay cheque.
All other opensource solutions were also too hard to install and lacked features. Added many features that easily outpace the closed source competition
Made it easy to run/use/download/modify to get the numbers up then and sell subscription/hosted solution for those who dont have time. Also taking on many interesting custom solutions for people and companies that I've met through this project.
Thanks a lot for this project! I love it, and will be using it from now on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33923137
We started with a simple web scraping solution for real estate market that was up and running in just a couple of days. We used it to track prices of apartments in our area aggregated across multiple websites.
Then, as we saw value in this, we expanded data scraping to other cities and types of properties and released the product to external users. We had a few paying customers after a couple of months.
As we wanted to include more websites to collect data from, we run into significant problems of being blocked. In result, we started investigating how to overcome different mechanisms that websites use to prevent automated traffic from web scrapers.
It turns out that one of the the most important factors is to use good quality proxy which provides IP addresses shared with other real users and change them frequently. So, we started building our own proxy infrastructure powered by 4G proxies and implemented an API on top of it. And this is how we created Scraping Fish API for web scraping.
Now, we can offer a reliable solution for scraping even the most demanding websites like Instagram or Facebook.
Here is the full story of our product on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish
When you say "4G proxies", are these devices that route their traffic over 4G connections via the mobile network? So you are using the IP ranges of telecommunications companies rather than clouds?
Also, how do you protect against customers doing illegal things with the IP's that are assigned to your business?
We have some domains blacklisted and periodically monitor logs for websites which our customers scrape but so far not a single case of illegal scraping.
We've also decided to go with a small $2 purchase instead of free trial account with no credit card required. If someone contacts us with their use case and request for a free test account, we're happy to create one for them but it has to go through us. This way we're not a good choice for people willing to do illegal stuff with our API.
I asked on the guys that runs scrapping bee but he just ignored me.
Let's say that we want to pursue this idea anyway. We would have to reach our to every website owner that our clients scrape and figure out how to share the revenue. You cannot just transfer your money to another company. You need to sign a contract and in many cases have it approved by legal and compliance teams.
A lot of people will answer "solve a real-world problem and alleviate your customers' pain points", but I've seen so many people interpret this in the most bizarre ways possible, go down ridiculously dumb paths and fall flat on their arse.
To be brutally honest, if you're asking how to find a product idea on HN, I don't think you'll be successful. Good business ideas jump out at you screaming, and you'll just stumble across them from time to time. Trying to artificially/rationally force this process pretty much guarantees failure.
There are people that glorify failure too, as some kind of "learning exercise", but I think for most it's genuinely painful, can waste years of your life, make you bitter and destroy relationships.
Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you.
Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot.
Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise you and your brain takes that dopamine rush and considers the job over. Don’t tell anyone, just get to work.
We're almost 8 billion people. If even just a half/quarter of them has a phone or a computer, you can't not find 100 freaking human beings that like what you built.
I am proudly building something in my free time that was probably made over and over, but always without something that I need. Or I have ideas on how such apps could improve, and I have the skill to do it myself, so... Plus the pleasure of learning new things in your free time, why not. Worst case scenario, you can still use your own app.
First-to-market is overvalued. You want others to make mistakes so you can draft behind them and take over.
Tell everyone about your idea. But you have to silo people's feedback. Do they have enough knowledge to actually tell you if the idea is good or bad? Are they a potential customer? If they are a potential customer and they like it, are they willing to pay for it? If they are a potential customer and don't like it, why not? What would need to change about it for them to pay for it?
Build stuff for the people who will pay you for it and then you'll have a side hustle.
I do think you're right about tech. Try it yourself, build it out, have some fun, be a dork. Then tell people.
Not sure if that was your intent but I just want to make it crystal clear that that's completely untrue.
Building good businesses and identifying profitable ideas is a skill that can be learned.
> Good business ideas jump out at you screaming
Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.
Sitting down to brainstorm ideas is a lot less likely to lead to a good idea than listening over a longer period of time.
The reason I left a discouraging comment is that, unlike the other examples, people in certain communities (including here!) have a weird tendency where they feel they must become a successful entrepreneur or they've failed in life.
This is especially bad because businesses started because the founder wants to be an entrepreneur (as opposed to those businesses where the founder has organically come across a real problem to solve/gap in the market) tend to fail in the most awkward ways possible.
We glorify this failure as "real world education", but every time I've seen someone go through this before and it genuinely breaks them.
>Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.
Cheeky comment aside, what I meant by this is that most good ideas aren't generated by a logical process but instead by (often viscerally) observing something that makes you go "WTF".
Thoughts like "Why does existing product x suck so much?" or "Why is it so hard/expensive to do simple thing x?" or "Why do customer base x pay so much for this dead basic product?" are good launch points for a profitable business, whereas "what would a product look like that makes life easier for niche segment x"[1] generally isn't.
The former are more reactions that "jump out" as you as you do other things, whereas the latter is a sit-down task that you work through.
[1] Of course, questions like these have their place, but not when you're creating the initial idea.
His father was a name partner in a law firm, so Gates got all his legal advice for free, probably including leasing his software rather than selling it, which had huge ramifications.
His mother was on the board of directors of United Way with IBM's CEO, and she hooked up Bill Gates with the CEO and Bill Gate's software was on IBM's PC.
IBM tried to get a PC operating system and went to Gary Kildall to get his version of DR-DOS, but there were disagreements and IBM said no. So they went to Microsoft, who went out and purchased an operating system for $25,000 as I remember ($93,502.72 in today's dollars) from another company and named it MS-DOS and they were able to strike a deal with IBM.
Gates probably had this 3 or 4 year window that he hit perfectly for having his software be able to become the top company. A few years later and it would be too late.
There is a lot of luck involved.
My philosophy is a tweak in that it should take months of your life and not years
Rapidly iterate ideas until you have one that fits the criteria
Never get married to a position, that applies to the shares you created at a zero cost basis too.
I was looking at my old personal web sites after working on a different startup and really felt sad about how gross social media was getting, and how money focused the web was becoming. I wanted to see creative and interesting personal websites again outside of the context of a museum.
So I coded up a prototype and, turns out I wasn't the only one interested in that.
HN readers did the first booster of funds we had that got the site started so I like to note that HN did our "seed round" and thanks for that, hope you got a good ROI.
I was asking myself why the benefits of version control was not used more outside of the software industry, and decided to work on a MVP to prove/disprove it's usefulness in another hobby - photography