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Ask HN: I'm out of ideas for side projects. Help please.
Hi HN,
For the last few weeks I've been trying to come up with ideas for income generating side projects ($500-1K range). Things I've considered:
- SaaS, physical products, etc. related to activities or hobbies I personally enjoy.
- Online drop-shipping store (selling products from e.g. AliExpress) catering specific niches.
- Review websites for specific niches, monetization via Amazon Affiliate links.
I used the AdWords Keyword Planner tool to research different niches, see how many monthly searches they have on average, and how much the suggested bid is.
I tried pretty much every niche I could possibly think of, no matter how small or ridiculous. What I found is all those niches are already quite saturated. Same story for stuff related to my personal interests.
Now I'm stuck and out of ideas.
Perhaps you guys could help me come up with new ideas. Are there any niches you're personally interested in that you feel are underserved or could use some competition? Any products or services you wish existed?
Thanks!
- ladytron 10y agoGo somewhere that has very little technology - maybe where there are a lot of older people or poor people. Analyse the market and see if you can automate something or streamline a process with technology. Look for problems in a low tech area you can solve with a bit of tech.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoThanks for the ideas!
- benologist 10y agohttps://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/ https://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/ https://angel.co/saas https://angel.co/saas Lot of dead startups probably had good ideas and bad timing or execution. Lot of live-startups you can compete with. Giant startups making javascript frameworks and animation libraries smell ripe for disruption too.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoThank you!
- atmosx 10y agoI believe that all the ideas you mentioned could work, if implemented correctly by a skilled entrepreneur or dedicated team. None of it seems brilliant or original by any means, but generally speaking, the idea is overrated.. Even apparently stupid ideas (another note app? Really? REALLY? - another bookmarking app? Oh please...) can work wonders if executed correctly.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoThank you! If you have any personal experience on this, I'd love to hear it.
- tomcam 10y agoClassic motivation for successful projects like this is pain points. Do you have any itches that could be scratched by a technological solutions?
- arisAlexis 10y agofunny I have the opposite problem. I have a ton of them in a backlog but don't have time to implement.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoWould you be willing to share some of those ideas? I can contact you privately if you prefer.
- arisAlexis 10y agoyou haven't mentioned anything from your background, most of them are app based. you can find my email on my profile
- CuriouslyC 10y agoThe way I see it, the biggest opportunities for the foreseeable future are VR and tools that leverage deep learning to enable unskilled people to produce high quality creative works (e.g. neural drawing, neural music making, neural writing, etc). Doing a side project in either of these areas is more likely to lead to something revolutionary, and even if you fail your job prospects will be greatly improved. On the other hand, both of these areas are hard, but in life, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
- mrfusion 10y agoWhat do you recommend for a VR project?
- CuriouslyC 10y agoA game would be the easiest thing to get started with. I think down the line, virtually exploring places via scene reconstruction from multiple cameras is going to be absolutely epic, but that is a fairly hard problem.
- fspear 10y agoI have a feeling that e-learning is going to be the killer app for VR/Augmented reality.
- 0xdeaddead 10y agoThis is one of the hype filled and most valley answers I've ever read. You even used the word "revolutionary". Jony is that you?
- CuriouslyC 10y agoWhat were you trying to accomplish with this comment?
- 0xdeaddead 10y ago
- 0xdeaddead 10y agoDon't create anything new, find a product that people use (and pay for) but are not 100% satisfied with, and make it better.
- mindcrime 10y agoOne thing to try is do a google search for "$PRODUCT_NAME sucks". Find the forums and blogs where people rant about the problems with that product, and then use those ideas in your own thing. For example: https://www.google.com/search?num=30&q="sharepoint+sucks" https://www.google.com/search?num=30&q="sharepoint+sucks"
- fspear 10y ago"Making it better" is usually not a simple task, specially for established products.
- Exclamationmark 10y agoI have a couple of ideas that I do not have the skill to create and am happy to share. One I am interested in using if you build it. What's the best way to contact you to share them?
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoPlease email me at: hi [at] leandro [dot] me. Thanks!
- fspear 10y agoI'm stuck in the same spot. I agree that a lot of niches are already quite saturated. Are you open to collaborate? Maybe if we put our heads together we could think of something.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoThat would be awesome :) How do I contact you?
- fspear 10y agoCan I contact you? A bit hesitant about putting my email here.
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoYou can email me at: hi [at] leandro [dot] me
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JPLeRouzic 10y ago* Many new jobs exist only to make sure that some robot works correctly. Even heavy equipment are robotized and remote controlled nowaday. Maybe you can create one million jobs thanks to a portal that would enable employers to recruit capacity to monitor through Internet, it would be improved later (two years) with capacity to assess and much later (10 years?) to operate equipments. The employer buy capacity, not a team. The employees bid for the job, but several can work simultaneously. A majority logic helps to verify if they are reliable. There is a reputation system for employees.
- gressquel 10y agoI have a cool project that I started on but didnt have time to finish. Anyone interested PM me, its stack; .net core Html Jquery .net core / c# is the only requirement
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoSweet! What's the best way to contact you?
- gressquel 10y agoIm kinda shy writing my email here. Could I maybe contact you instead?
- JohnnySpaghetti 10y agoPlease email me at: hi [at] leandro [dot] me
- ejanus 10y agoMail me(interested)...mail address in my profile page
- gressquel 10y agoI cannot see any contact details on your profile. user: ejanus created: 2036 days ago karma: 22 about: Software programmer
- su8898 10y agohi, I am interested. could you please share the details? su88981 [at] gmail [dot] com. thanks so much.
- mindcrime 10y agoOne idea you could try is this: take an "old" idea and "remix" it, improve it, etc. The book Rethink[1] has a lot on this. And it makes sense.. in computing, things really tend to go in cycles and what's old is often new again. Take Neural Networks for example. This is an idea that's so old it's practically archaic. But add some new ideas on training (backprop, discovered in the 80's or so), along with hardware advances due to Moore's Law and the advent of the GPU, as well as the surge in data volumes enabled by the Internet, always-connected devices and advances in storage technology, and BOOM... you have the hottest topic in the world today. So go back in time... read old computing books, read old issues of InfoWorld or Network Computing from the 90's or early 2000's, or find some old issues of Byte magazine on Ebay, and mine through those... and find an old idea that can be combined with some new advances or new technologies, to make something that's mondo radical. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Rethink-Surprising-History-New-Ideas/dp/1501145606 https://www.amazon.com/Rethink-Surprising-History-New-Ideas/...
- theoh 10y agoI'm sure I've read a jokey guide to succeeding as a CS grad student that tells you to do exactly this, but tongue-in-cheek. Maybe someone else will recall the URL.
- b_emery 10y ago"Live in the future, then build what's missing." http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Looks of good meta advice there. Also, read a lot from adjacent fields. I do this in research and the cross pollination is a big source of ideas. See the book "Where good ideas come from" for details. Based on watching my kids, I'm convinced that we're input-output machines. If I give them a bunch of ideas (without them realizing it) I see these ideas come back later, distorted and recombined with other ideas in their play. I think that basic mechanism of creativity is inherent - and also very useful.
- jason_slack 10y agoI have some ideas for HFT and also a few ideas for blockchain uses. I don't have time to work on them. Email me if you want.
- pravenj 10y agomaybe hack a project for extreme affordability from hackproject.org? More problem discussion in the slack channel where you can self-register hackprojectorg.herokuapp.com. Even old problems or simple problems that you might have not even looked at with passing eyes could have dramatic effect for extremely rural areas and what the UN calls the frontier worlds.
- nassir 10y agoMight be worth exploring emerging and frontier markets in areas such as payments etc. What I've come to realize is that in the US market at least, the cost of customer acquisition is high and continues to rise, hence if you are not well capitalized, within a short span you are out of the game
- nnn1234 10y agoI would say look at indiehackers and see if there is something similar you want to do. Also why not join someone else s project? Collaborate on something that's close to your vision get them to sales and voila.
- nnn1234 10y agoHere is a place where you can easily create a group around your idea. Github exists for coders, people are massaging it for other projects. Crowdsourcing platforms are many but each have their faults. I am building a platform for anyone to contribute to projects. We are disrupting the future of work. PLease check out www.crowdraising.co/metacampaign and there is an explainer video that does the job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3QT4lqco8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3QT4lqco8M