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Ask HN: What Should I Build?
I've got several years of experience working for two public clouds and building core services in the containers/compute space.
I'd like to eventually build something in this space (side project that I can grow into something that will pay the bills someday) but I can never come up with ideas for side projects.
Anyone have suggestions for projects I can build?
Alternatively - What's the best way to get exposed to customer problems in this space? I honestly do not know.
- hamza__nouali 6y agoI can't tell you what to build, but I can help you my own experience. How to find product ideas? Good to know: You can't come up with a 100% original idea. Take inspiration from other products and fix the bad things in them: - UI/UX - Add or reduce features. - Change the target customer. How to find products to copy? 1) Marketplaces: Go to Envato, Chrome store, AppSumo, App Store, etc and find products with a lot of downloads but a low rating. Read the reviews carefully and extract the pain points. 2) Stories: You can find problems, ideas, and markets by reading other product stories. 3) PH, IH, HN, Betalist, etc: If you are looking for product ideas, make sure to follow these websites: - Product Hunt. - Hacker News. - IndieHackers. - Beta list. 4) Freelancing: Working as a freelancer will let you know people's needs and their pain points. - You can find some tasks that can be easily automated. - Softwares they are using. - Plugins ideas. What if you don't want to work as a freelancer? 5) Spy on freelancers: Browsing Upwork, Guru, Fiverr, etc will let you know what businesses are looking for. It's a great way to find tasks that can be automated.
- hamza__nouali 6y agoIt's good to start learning marketing, sales, copywriting, and everything related to business. Tech skills are not enough these days.
- emteycz 6y agoMy approach is to build a few end user apps. Silly things or something that will make the life easier for my parents, for example - recently I made a self-hosted family photo gallery with backup to cloud. This way, you can see the problems of building apps, and that could give you new ideas for your core platform services - it certainly gives me ideas.