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Ask HN: How to come up with monetizable side project ideas?

426 points by sunilkumarc 8y ago

I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life. Having been worked in different companies over the last 4 years, I feel I've acquired enough knowledge to develop big applications(big enough to make money) on my own. I was wondering, how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side. Any inputs, resources and wisdom are appreciated!

croo 8y ago
I recommend the book "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling about this topic. It pokes every aspects of starting side projects including how to find something worthwhile to create. It really changed my perspective of how to find out if a side project could work or not.
- nathan_f77 8y ago
  Thanks for that recommendation, it sounds great! I just ordered it on Amazon, and also signed up for the MicroConf [1] mailing list. [1] https://www.microconf.com https://www.microconf.com
  - rmason 8y ago
    I second the book and recommend the podcast that Rob does with another guy named Mike Tabor. It's called Startups for the rest of us, lots of wisdom in that library! You can even send them questions and they'll do an entire show in reply. https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
xellisx 8y ago
I have a couple ideas I could sell you.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
  Well you already let one loose. Sell your ideas!
  - xellisx 8y ago
    That was a freebie. Just a taste.
    - johntash 8y ago
      How much for the rest?
      - xellisx 8y ago
        One meeeelion dollars. But act today and get a 50% discount.
        johntash 8y ago
        Can I get a few more 50% discounts stacked on top of that offer? I'd like 150% off, please.
        xellisx 8y ago
        How about I give you one of my ideas, and you give me 1% of the profit? Sell the my designs on thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/ellisgl/designs https://www.thingiverse.com/ellisgl/designs
tobltobs 8y ago
> how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side. You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times. > I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life. Sounds like you have already build something. Brush those up, make them available for the public and for the start don't think about how you will make money from those. You will get users and feedback. Those might help you in building something which will earn money.
- TrinaryWorksToo 8y ago
  It might be sustainable, but only because you're not charging anything. Also, products don't have to be different to be successful. If something has a high price, it has not reached market saturation, so the same good would be fine there.
- ziffusion 8y ago
  > You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times. You realize that that's how it felt like to most people at almost any point of time in the human history?
- jen729w 8y ago
  What? Nonsense. Ask someone you know who doesn’t work in technology what they need. A teacher, a plumber, your doctor, your mechanic. I guarantee that someone will come up with something. Us geeks think all of the problems have been solved because most of our problems have been solved. Meanwhile the rest of the world doesn’t know that we can actually help them because they don’t know to ask and we don’t think to.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Even in tech, find some speciality market that isn't well-served by programmers already. My day job is information security, and our tool sets are atrocious. We use them because it's all we've got, and the security field isn't well known for being a software engineering powerhouse. I could list off a ton of programs I'd love to have, but are way (way way way) too niche to pop up on the radar of anyone who doesn't work in security.
leesec 8y ago
I've seen a lot of people have good success with a side project they do called 'waiting tables' and they make a few extra hundred a month very consistently with little risk.
- nsx147 8y ago
  Very little retained value there. Short term
swalberg 8y ago
Focus less on your own problems and pay attention to the problems that other people have. Especially problems where they've come up with really hacky workarounds -- think Excel spreadsheets, weird approval/email chains, manual import/exporting from one system to another, etc. All good signs that there's something to be improved, and that it's enough of a problem to put effort into. Couple of other thoughts -- your problems are likely not to be technical. They're going to be obtaining domain knowledge, marketing, and supporting your product. I'll second the recommendation on "Start Small, Stay Small". Also Eric Reis' "Lean Startup" and 37 Signals "Getting Real". The latter two were really helpful in getting my most successful project out the door and making money.
- ozten 8y ago
  Do you have any book recommendations specifically for the online marketing piece? Or does the space change too fast for books? I’ve picked up some read user forums, write content for marketing, email lists, and pricing tips, but haven’t found a “definitive guide”.
  - swalberg 8y ago
    No, sorry. Mostly it came down to "find out where your customers are". I had a payroll service for home help, so I reached out to the people who place the people and pitched the service as a way to help their customers. I had a site to check for security problems in popular blog frameworks so I made it so you could direct link to a site's results and then helped people out on forums, providing a link to the analysis. Stuff like that. Advertising on FB/AdWords/etc can help, but there's no substitute for finding your customers yourself.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Start a sandbox of some sort, some kind of (digital) file to collect things in. Collect stories and examples of successful side projects that resonate with you. (You can start by searching HN. This gets talked about a fair amount here.) Also, collect your ideas and start fleshing them out. Also, collect information on how small side projects get monetized.
evan_ 8y ago
A friend of mine shared his strategy with me: find some big uninteresting data set from the government or whatever, figure out some way to make it interesting for regular people, and build a nice interface to it. For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site. Monetizing it is still an issue...
- newman8r 8y ago
  That's similar to Matthew Lesko's strategy (AKA question mark guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko) Many of his books consisted of freely available government publications.
- akudha 8y ago
  This reminds me of city-data.com It is an ugly looking site, the forums are full of nasty comments, but it is still useful at some level I guess. They claim to get millions of page views. Not sure how much money they make, but they have been around for more than a decade
- Odenwaelder 8y ago
  https://www.northdata.de/ https://www.northdata.de/ Did something like that: Crawl public registries for companies, parse changes to them and build a graph out of it. Very cool!
- megaman8 8y ago
  There's a lot of stuff in this space that hasn't been done yet, but that's for a very good reason. First of all, it doesn't pass the toothbrush test: it's the type of thing that's super valuable the first time you visit but you don't really need to come back to it over and over. Second big problem: SEO. Search engines like long form written content, they don't know how to value tools that slice and dice data: they simply don't see any value in it and you'll never get SEO from it.
arithma 8y ago
One thing I will try doing soon is to look for job postings of companies, and then look what those companies are looking for, and what domain they're in. The theory is: maybe I can get product ideas 1) as spin-offs from their general mission, or 2) maybe I'd be able to replace their job posting with a product.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  I used to do a variation of this by looking at project requests posted on RentACoder or other outsourcing sites and considering if there was a product idea there.
- swalsh 8y ago
  When I first started consulting, I had an idea of specializing in automating business processes. It was something I had done before, and I really enjoyed it. However I ran into the problem of those that understood the potential had already employed a few full time devs, and those that didn't, also did not understand the potential. I reasoned that people who needed automation were hiring tons of people. So I searched job ads that looked close to what I thought an ideal customer might be as a way to generate leads. It turned out to be a fairly low quality way to find leads. Random cold calling would have probably netted me the same conversion rate.
  - nautist 8y ago
    I have similar story: corporate experience in process design and implementation and moved to consulting with idea of using knowledge and connections. What I realized I have no way to sell to big business. And s.m.b. don't use erp, let alone bpmn. s.m.b are quite happy keeping notes in spreadsheets and smartphones. Most of the market for bpmn comes from regulation and certification e.g. ISO certification requires processes to be reproducible and documented (with appr. software) and the list goes on say if company goes public and all of that. No s.m.b has this requirement, so there's no marketing to them.
jppope 8y ago
1) Go and interact with people/companies in "unsexy" industries. The stuff cool silicon valley companies don't want to touch (shipping, waste removal, small manufacturing, etc). They have shit ton's of small problems that they would gratefully hand over spare change for the problem to go away. 2) Find Entrepreneurs that have had a couple of hits, and don't have the time or resources for small things. They'll more than likely just give you the idea. 3) Pick up freelance gigs and get an agreement that give you rights to the underlying code. (I.E. the unique combination of elements belongs to the client.) If you do enough of this you will start to find efficiencies. You will start finding ideas all over the place when you see how other people work. 4) Read a lot. But about niche things. 5) Read blog articles by Venture Capitalists/ Angels. don't work for them... but built the stuff that they want built. Also... Please build a themeforest for Bulma. I haven't had time to do it and I hate working in Bootstrap.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  Number 2 is very true. Make sure you choose people who have actually successfully built something not just a serial wantraprenuer. They can tell the difference between an idea that sounds good in theory and one that will work in the real world.
- BLanen 8y ago
  Concerning nr.1: Maybe find areas where people use excel sheets/ or word/pdf forms that they email around to each other. Always seemed like an idea to me. Disclaimer: just a wantrepreneur.
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  I'll second that Bulma wish, I'd buy templates off that.
- dahx4Eev 8y ago
  Are you looking for landing pages, corporate sites or web app templates built with Bulma?
a13n 8y ago
It's really easy to make a few hundred dollars a month if you're good at product and can do basic marketing. 1. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. https://getlatka.com https://getlatka.com 2. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value. 3. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it. 4. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers. I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.
- handymarks 8y ago
  What's your email I'd ? :) Thanks !
  - a13n 8y ago
    My first name @ my company's domain
    - geuis 8y ago
      Dunno why people are still afraid of just posting their email addresses. I use gmail for my domain specific account and just rely on their spam catching tools. If you run your own server then there are lots of anti spam tools as well. Edit: To expand on my reasoning, don’t make it hard for people to contact you. There’s no reason to be afraid of spurious email contacts. They’re easy to mark as spam and ignore future contacts. When have you seen people obfuscate their public social media contact addresses? I haven’t seen anyone hide their Twitter, FB public pages, or LinkedIn addresses. Email shouldn’t be any different for general contact purposes. Now the one exception I have is work email addresses. I don’t publicize those. charles@geuis.com
superasn 8y ago
Having created a few money making side projects here is some advice: 1. In my experience B2B ideas are best for quick monetization compared to B2C. 2. Think of roadblocks you face creating your own site. Pretty sure somebody else will face them too (many great products were created out of this, readme.io, statuspage, etc) 3. Don't go all in. I never spend more than 2 weeks before submitting my project on PH, HN, mailing my list. Don't ever make the mistake of working on something for 2 years alone not telling anyone about it. 4. Don't reinvent the wheel. Ie don't waste time on things like your login page (HNs login page is a great example on how much it matters), hiring designers (a template from HTML5rocks or wrapbootstrap is just as good). A lot of these things (support, auth, chat, etc) are offered as Saas services and can be integrated directly to save you weeks in launch. 5. Marketing is where you want to spend most of your time since yoh ask about making money. Also don't be afraid of pricing. Read patio11 black art of saas pricing for an excellent guide. Learn content marketing, SEO, etc. Good luck!
- swingline-747 8y ago
  Clarification: Don't reinvent the wheel means Don't exactly copy another product. It's damn important to reinvent defensible products that either, and hopefully do all of: a) solve a slightly different problem b) target different users c) solve the problem in a 10x better, compelling way Uniqueness will be added to the collective, so don't bother creating categories because that requires extra effort building validation from below zero and any new products coming along can execute much easier with the lessons and improvements of the "settlers."
  - bkovacev 8y ago
    I don’t believe that your clarification of the point you quoted is correct. It sounds more as if the commenter wanted to point out that it is better to outsource/Saas chat, login, design and the likes to some external service instead of wasting time on it initially. With that said - I believe you have a point in what you stated. A lot of products came out as a better copy of another product.
  - asimjalis 8y ago
NKosmatos 8y ago
My two cents... Find a service-tool-solution for something that could be used by many people (try not to think of only your country/language but global), build it fast and simple but practical and fast, offer it for a really low price (coffee, beer, pizza range) so that you can be certain that you’ll have users/customers. Oh yeah, and build it so that it doesn’t need too much of your time. As for good ideas, that’s the tricky part. Look around and open your ears... sorry for not letting you know of my exit plan idea ;-)
cstanton 8y ago
As a marketer, I see countless great projects that were abandoned. What seems like a promising project goes dry when, presumably, the dev can’t market it. Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life. I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren’t making money on it, versus building something brand new.
- swingline-747 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't get it. People put all this time and effort into something and then murder it, and post their "self-fulfilling victimhood apology letter" "why we shutdown and left our customers twisting in the wind." Build something that doesn't cost much to keep going and let it simmer at least 5x longer than you think. And, make copyright dates self-updating. ;) Furthermore, if it's not losing copious amounts of money, pivot, restructure it or sell it to somebody else. Shutting down usually == disrespecting money. Or they become slightly successful and abandon it, like they have self-harm tendencies.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    Sometimes the problem is that it takes 10 years for the thing to finally start generating real money, but by this point everyone involved has moved on and you have customers that you don't want to let down, but really the thing is Rails 3 and the $100k of profit per year it is bringing in aren't really worth the headache of upgrading everything. I think in the next 5 years someone is going to invent an entire stack for long-lived apps. Where every level is as simple as possible and the only updates that are issued are security updates. We need computers to be able to run 30 year old software without having to stress, and the only way I can think of doing that is to minimize feature development and complexity.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Why is Rails not a stack for long-lived apps? Or "JAM", MEAN, LAMP, .NET or any of the other popular technologies people have chosen over the past quarter century? Sure, it might be harder to find someone willing to write PHP now than it was in 1998, but that's how things work when new technologies are constantly being invented. With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.
zylepe 8y ago
I was in the same boat after 4 years of working and built a simple side project that solves a clear problem and now has several hundred thousand MAU (https://onthegomap.com https://onthegomap.com) and costs a few hundred dollars a month to run. My question is on logistics: Adsense brings in a bit less than expenses. Many users have expressed interest in supporting the project financially. Any recommendations on services to let people do that? One person recommended Patreon but that seems more geared towards artists.
- karaokeyoga 8y ago
  Hi, I run a small site and have recently made a simple change that has increased revenue significantly. I couldn't find your contact info in your profile. My email is bryndyment@gmail.com … get in touch? FYI my site is a simple tool for learning the various Japanese alphabets. It has benefitted from being online for a long time (thus, good SEO) but I have struggled with monetization until recently. Still not a huge money maker but I'm much happier after this change. Email me!
- citrablue 8y ago
  Why not make it a traditional SAAS application that charges $10/month?
  - GFischer 8y ago
    Not all apps can be monetized that way. Maybe some kind of freemium model, or some kind of partnership with the correct target for the audience would make more sense.
- kika 8y ago
  I hate you :-) Opened your app and stuck there for a good half an hour, mapping my walking routes around the neighborhood :-) I want my half an hour back!!11
- LittlePeter 8y ago
  More than 15 way-points: $$$ Want to save the map: $$$ Sync to GPS-nav device: $$$ Show places to eat with a rating: $$$
snake117 8y ago
For those who have built and deployed applications before, how do you go about planning/developing your idea before you begin building it? For example, do you sketch out rough drafts with something like Balsamiq Mockups or just pen and paper? Do you bother filling out the YC application to flesh out your idea (even if you don't plan on applying)? There are different approaches to achieve this, but finding a technique that is both comprehensive enough and time efficient is the challenge.
- rpedela 8y ago
  For me, it depends on what I'm building. If there is a GUI, then I usually write basic HTML and CSS using Bootstrap as my foundation. I prefer that over Balsamiq because I can work out flow as well as layout. If it is an API then I design the list of functions and parameters first in a text editor. Or the list of commands and arguments for a command-line tool. If you notice I start with the high-level design first rather than the code. I find I build a better tool/product doing that first and I often save time. Personally I find myself doing a lot of code churn if I start with the code.
yen223 8y ago
1. Search through the highest-selling 100 apps in your favourite app store 2. Looks for apps which are poorly-rated (< 4 stars). These are apps which serves an actual need, but whose execution is lacking. 3. Build polished versions of those apps.
- notdang 8y ago
  Found one: Uber
  - drewmol 8y ago
    Good example. Remember to start small, build it on open source and sell it to small cities
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      Yes, you wouldn't compete with Uber directly but you could look at some small piece of that business which they can't serve very well because of their size.
- mandeepj 8y ago
  pasting a link here to save everyone else few mins - https://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/top-grossing-apps/ https://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/top-grossing-apps/
dabockster 8y ago
Just start building free stuff until something sticks. Then figure out how you can make money from it or something similar.
- amirouche 8y ago
  I am in this situation and now I stumbled upon a (good?) idea with some code but it's very difficult to market as it aims at replacing one of the most successful software of all the time, namely git.
  - dabockster 8y ago
    Have you posted on Twitter or an Ask HN thread here? I would stay away from Reddit, personally.
    - amirouche 8y ago
      Yes, both. Honestly, it's difficult to have a deep public convo even on HN. I had some contact with people interested in the idea of a git for (big) structured data. The problem is that a) Data Science practice is not mature enough for the kind of problem my project is solving aka. collaborating around structured data to improve reproducibility and QA. b) mature data science project already have ad-hoc solutions and they are not ready to migrate to a freshly new solution.
eurticket 8y ago
I don't understand the whole monetize XYZ, shouldn't we all be designing(making) things that help or solve problems to make others lives easier and therefore built into the project is $omething valuable for your time and ingenuity? If it helps people then let them try it and pay what they want for it, which tells you how much you're helping based on how much they are paying.
- Jack000 8y ago
  I spent a few months developing this app: https://deepnest.io https://deepnest.io where I have a "pay what you want" model. Currently it has a conversion rate of 2.08%, with average payment of $28.73 totalling 1,556.00 in the past month. In terms of income it's really not great, as I imagine actual commercial software in this space is making much more than that. I guess it really depends on how much you value money vs having people use your software or other ancillary benefits.
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    That looks really nice! Great landing page. The screen shots look like simply straight-forward UI. Good work!
argimenes 8y ago
What software have you yourself paid for? Try making that. If you don't pay for software, what would entice you to pay? If you don't know you need to do market research into what other people do pay for...
arthev 8y ago
Maybe this is of interest: https://jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-idea-machine/ https://jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate-guide-for-bec...
jamesheathen 8y ago
If you understand offset lithography, and ways to impose page sizes onto press sheets given a set of constraints, with the utlimate goal of minimizing expenditure - that'a a very difficutl problem to answer with real work appplications.
adamqureshi 8y ago
TIME. Time is the MOST precious commodity. Help users SAVE TIME. Save time finding something of value to the USER. You can't "presume" how much to charge. You have to "TEST" pricing then keep jacking it up until your customers don't pay. How can you pay for something what does not offer value. Stay small. Stay NICHE. Grab a slice from a BIG market. Forget millions. slap-yo-self with fury with delusions of becoming a millionaire, and make a goal of making enough to avoid being trapped in a 9-5 lifer situation. It take a LOT of luck + skill + market segment expertise. Like you have to KNOW the market you are going to be competing in. Assisted living , senior care , retirement calculator is VERY hot now. You'll be at it after your day gig 6pm-2am testing / building / iterating. Good LUCKY. launch a free beta version learn what customers value and how much they will pay ( ask them) THEN when you have enough people crack addict addicted to your service / app start charging. Be merciless. But offer excellent customer service. Always be honest.
victor_ronin 8y ago
I wouldn't be suggesting ideas and approaches. I would instead concentrate on "few hundred dollars per month". I think you are setting the bar too low if you are in US. Let say this side project will generate $200/month and you are spending 15 hours a month on it. It means that your hourly rate will be $13 (which is way-way below software engineer hourly wage). If the goal is do something useful, then work on opensource (for free). If the goal is to get some additional income, then you need to find an idea which can grow more than couple hundred bucks a month.
einarvollset 8y ago
Honestly, if you have a full time job (which it sounds like), i’d consider buying a product. At that kind of revenue prices are extremely reasonable - the only challenging is binary: is this worth $0 or something else.
mandeepj 8y ago
Applications repeat themselves - apps like chat, productivity suites (word, excel), photos - got moved from desktop to web and later to smartphones. If you had developed a first chat app on iphone back in 2009 then imagine the leverage. A new platform is in the making - AR\VR, so keep an eye.
leowoo91 8y ago
B2B might make sense but beware it needs more maintenance at some point.
helen842000 8y ago
While I agree with some of the tactics here (make a twist on similar ideas, contact businesses, buy a business, brush up an existing product you built) I'm going to suggest an alternative method that has worked for me. Start with the money. If you want monetization to be guaranteed you need to prioritize that first. Take this method and rinse/repeat for you and your skills. 1) How much do you really want to make from this a month, what would make you happy? Let's say you decide $1k a month would make it worth it after time, expenses and payment processing fees. 2) You then decide how many customers you really want to have to find and how much support email you want to answer. Usually developers pick prices like $6 and wonder why no-one buys. This low price screams a lack of confidence in the product. That you aren't taking it seriously. That you may not be around in 8 weeks. Starting without monetization in mind or equally, pricing low is the death of a product because for someone who dislikes marketing you just set yourself a huge marketing mountain to climb. At $6 each, finding and selling to 150+ customers - when you don't even have one yet is a huge trek to your $1k happy place. Let's say you feel more confident about finding and serving 10 customers really well. That seems achievable, right? So with just 10 customers we're looking at a $100 a month product, right? Whoa, you're thinking you could never build something that's worth that much. Maybe you're worried it's enterprise level costs now and that's not the type of product you want to build. Don't worry, a $100 product can be really simple. Often developers think that a big cost means solving a big problem and that a big problem needs a big solution. Not true at all. A big problem can be solved with a small elegant solution. 3) Now we know how much we want to make and how many customers we need and how much we are going to sell it for. We now need to find the problem we are going to solve. So how big of a problem needs a $100 per month solution? Not very big at all really. Let's say a business owners time is super-conservatively worth $50-$100 an hour. So to add value, we are looking at saving someone between 2-4 hours a month on a task they normally have to do manually. That's not too bad! Or maybe you want to help them reduce their business costs by $200-$400. Also, very possible. Now we have the value proposition. We know what kind of problem we are looking for, so value will be clear for the customer. 4) Now we decide _who_ this is going to be for. Don't pick people the same as you. They have the same skills and can solve the same kinds of problems that you can. Pick a group of people :- - That are easily identifiable by what they call themselves on social media (blogger, podcaster, videographer, designer, public speaker etc) - Make sure they are a group you like interacting with, that you have some experience of working with already in some way (please pick a group you like and care about) - Make sure they are the decision maker in their own business (don't pick employees of big corps) - What tech skills have you worked with that overlaps with this customer group? Let's say you've worked on a few video platforms in the past so you know that space well, so you choose to help YouTubers. 5) What is the issue that we are solving? Ok, so now we're helping YouTubers to either save 2-4+ hours a month or reduce costs by $200+ - for your $100 MRR product. This is where we breakdown what it takes to run their business. What stops them being more profitable? What tasks do they do everyday? What can be automated? What do they hate doing in their business? If you know this space even a little, you will have answers here. Maybe video storage is a huge expense. Perhaps running their community takes up too much time so they can't scale. Is just publishing a video end to end super time consuming? Look at why. If you don't know what matters to them, ask. Make a hypothesis and see if it's true. In just a couple of DM's you might find that they spend a whole day a week on something repetitive. Or are spending money on something that you can optimize. Write a few possibilities down. 6) Make an offer In just a day or two you can go from no idea, to identifying a significant pain point for a group of people that's easy to reach. Now you consider a couple of small technical solutions for the problems you've found. You go back to a couple of your ideal customers and make them a proposition. Something like - "You said you spent X hours on this particular problem. If I built something to solve that, this week, would that be worth $100 to you?" If it's a huge pain point they will bite your hand off. If you get weak responses - no worry, you've not built any code yet. You can use the conversation to get to a deal. They might say it's worth less so you find out what features would be needed to make it worth the $100. Maybe they suggest a different problem that is more urgent for them. After a few conversations you should have at least a couple of paying customers and a clear solution. 8) Building Now you know exactly what you need to build and have customers waiting. There is no excuse but to launch. This will help you focus on the truly essential code. As you build, reach out to a few more potential customers. (we made sure they were easy to find earlier) Ask them if they have the same problem. Show them what you have. Go through a few cycles of building and feedback. Make sure people are paying you what you set out in the beginning - or close to it. Ask your starting customers for referrals. You'll reach your 10 customers with zero marketing spend. You then have all of the elements needed to scale further if you wish! Remember that code comes last in this method for a reason. Only build when you have paying customers.
haihaibye 8y ago
Companies use spreadsheets to fix gaps in their IT processes. Find these big, ugly, shared spreadsheets and turn them into webapps.
akudha 8y ago
One other idea is to find old desktop products in weird/small markets that are still selling, and make web apps to compete with those.
kashosoft 8y ago
It really changed my perspective of how to find out if a side project could work or not. https://www.programsnow.com/ https://www.programsnow.com/
mmeinesz 8y ago
my stalled project, maybe you want to take over? https://www.meinesz.de/automatische-nebenkostenabrechnung/ https://www.meinesz.de/automatische-nebenkostenabrechnung/
mmeinesz 8y ago
a stalled project of mine, maybe you want to take over?: https://www.meinesz.de/automatische-nebenkostenabrechnung/ https://www.meinesz.de/automatische-nebenkostenabrechnung/
wusatiuk 8y ago
I have already built several sideproject over the past 15 years. For me the hardest part as a marketer is to find a developer, mostly freelancers, who are willing to "dive into" the idea and work with the same passion as i do on the project, even if they are usually getting paid by hour. The biggest issue for me was finding a suitable developer who is willing to grow the one ore another project together with me. So if any of you guys is interested in a marketing partner and willing to invest his time into a project and split the revenue, i would be happy to get in tough with you. Now let´s come you back to your question - how to come up with an idea? I will discribe you my way: note down every "problem" somebody is telling you. No matter if it means "find the cheapest flight price", "would be cool if tool X could do Z" or if somebody tells you a terrible workflow within his company. In addition to that, we are all surfing the web all day long, so simply also note down things you like somewhere, and make screenshots / screencasts, if something is really great. when you do this some days / week, you will generate hundreds of cool ideas within a very short period of time. but the idea itself is worth nothing at all. the idea itself is just an idea.
- AlexITC 8y ago
  Sent you an email.
  - wusatiuk 8y ago
    thanks. :)
tmaly 8y ago
I am taking a different approach and trying to eventually write an ebook after reading the book Authority. I tried coding a food app, but I found that finding product market fit takes too long in some cases. This time around, I am trying to focus more on the marketing by using off the shelf systems and less on coding the site from hand.
vinayms 8y ago
At the risk of being grayed out to invisibility, I am going to say this. What you are asking is similar to "I think I have learnt playing the keyboard well enough as an assistant in an orchestra, now how to create great music for ads or whatever to make some pocket money?". This is a matter of creativity. The situation you describe is usually the other way around - people have ideas first and then learn whatever is necessary in order to realize their creativity, they don't start with a tool set and then look for ways to apply it. That is done by consultants. So may be you must become one? Creativity can't be taught. No amount of tips is going to substitute for innate creativity, of any degree, because all tips are effective only when you have an idea to work with, which is the product of creativity. If you don't have it, in this case identifying a problem and imagining a suitable solution, just do what all/most successful companies do - copy, but add a tiny variation to claim that its different and your own. All that said, my tip would be to keep eyes and mind open, and just build whatever you feel is right and release it. Do consider feedback but don't get discouraged by criticism. There are ample examples of how the most derided product ideas have ended up making quite a profit, not just in software, although luck had a major hand in their success.
- seventhtiger 8y ago
  Ideas do not only come from creativity. Creativity is a shortcut but ideas can be mechanically generated. You can analyze a niche market and identify gaps, statistically, and address the ones which will return value. He doesn't need tips. He needs a process to find a market data set and analyze it for profit opportunities. The amount of untouched data in the world tells me that it's really a matter of time, hardwork, and intelligence, rather than creativity.
andreliem 8y ago
So making a few hundred bucks per month with a product/project is not that difficult, but growing that or making it so the time you invested into it is not too high is difficult. My personal experience, I built a newsletter to a small size (800), took about year to do this so I definitely didn't scale out very fast by any measure. Either way I did reach a point where I was able to get a few hundred bucks per month in sponsorship. The time I put into it though didn't get the returns I needed to keep going at it so I've put it on hold and am not making any revenue now. It's one of those challenges where I believe I need to put a lot more time & money into it, take a risk and see if I can grow that revenue to a few thousand per month so that my time has better return. At a few hundred bucks it's not a passive income generating project. I thought this would be a good story to share because in thinking about what could make you a few hundred bucks, it would be good to define how you get there. Building a SAAS product takes a ton of time upfront, and a few hundred bucks per month won't be enough to justify that time... but of course it's proof of a business model that can get to the thousands per month, and maybe more!
ca98am79 8y ago
I tried to come up with ideas like this for years and failed. Then I just did things that were interesting to me and it led to a business. So, my advice is to not even try to come up with an idea. Simply explore what is interesting, but be open to turning it into a business