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Ask HN: How do you come up with side project ideas?
Everyone says to scratch your own itch and build something you would use.
What if nothing itches? Maybe I just live a simple life and don't feel I have a need for much.
What I do have is an itch to build something.
Unfortunately my job has changed so much over the years I hardly do any type of development work anymore. My job is shifting more into an Ad Farmer role.
Recently I have begun work on an internal system for work and it has reignited my love for it. Every time I get in this mode I have an urge to build something but I hit a roadblock when coming up with an idea.
I don't care to build yet another picture/messaging/food review/ web app.
So my question is, how do you come up with ideas for side projects?
- jbranchaud 12y agoWork on someone else's side project. I think we too often ignore this as a possibility. There are tons of people out there with an awesome vision/idea, but without the resources to achieve it. Find an awesome open-source project that is busting at the seams with issues/PRs and lend a hand.
- wislon 12y agoMost of my side projects tend to be mobile apps. Find things in the real world that either piss you off or make you wish that there was a better way of doing things. For example, public transport is usually a good source, and any PT company worth its salt has an API you can hit to do something useful with.
- 404error 12y agoI can see how public transport can be a pain in a big city. I live in a city of about 100K on the Central Coast of California. We build out not up like some of the more densely populated cities. Big money here is agriculture.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoBuild something agricultural.
- 404error 12y agoWikipedia builds a better picture of my town. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria,_California Know of any webapps that connect customers to local farmers? Offline we have farmers markets.
- phantom_oracle 12y agoTalk to your market if nothing itches for you. You may not have issues, but a lot of other people do. Especially in more mature markets, you'll even find markets for these niche wants (think instagram, twitter) or as it is known as "first-world problems". A good example is that recent front-page HN link about "I still haven't found the perfect photo organization tool yet" and through that, you'll have 10K users (if marketed well enough).
- 404error 12y agoThanks for the advice. I guess a first world problem for me would be the way private messaging works on Twitter. I wish there was a way to have a private group messaging feature. I find myself having to screen cap a conversation back and forth between recipients.
- phantom_oracle 12y agoI'd avoid twitter for the single reason being their API user-limit. If your service explodes somehow, you'll easily end up at 75,000 users with the stress that your product will die as user 100,001 will not be able to join. Also, you need to determine whether your problem is either "a proper product" or just a "feature request". In the case of the above, it seems like just a feature request.
- 404error 12y agoTrue, that sounds like a feature more than a product, plus I would hate to have to rely on third parties. I want to build a product, something useful.
- phantom_oracle 12y agoTry this: http://ideasquares.com/about http://ideasquares.com/about
- 404error 12y ago
- bramgg 12y agoI recently wrote a blog post[0] on this topic. Heads up my website is painfully slow ;) [0] http://www.bram.gg/post/how-to-get-ideas-for-side-projects http://www.bram.gg/post/how-to-get-ideas-for-side-projects
- 404error 12y agoThanks, I'll look through some of those sites you recommended.
- Yadi 12y agoThere are a lot of ways to come up with an idea if nothing itches: 1- Learn a new technology and you realize there is a missing feature in between 2 technologies and now you can full-fill it and make it happen: it can be a Rails gem, Node package, some library, or a service. 2- Try talking to peers and folks who you feel are smarter than you, if you can be influenced by them, they can give you a good insight on what solution is missing around you or in a specific field. 3- CHECKOUT PG's essay on coming up with startup ideas: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html 4- DON'T push it, don't focus on coming up with an idea just for the sake of doing something. Once you let that go, some ideas will come to you. 5- Go to communities like /rails or /webdev or just go on Github and do a random search and see what people have built and left it alone, maybe you can fork something then rebuilt it or go on top of it. 6- I personally endurance through books, tweets, blogs, hackersnews, reddit, quora, github, my client startups every f#$kin content I can find when I get excited and want to build something :)! So I'm not sure if that is the smartest way to do it all the time.
- 404error 12y agoThanks all are great suggestions, I will do some homework this week and see if I can get the ball rolling on something.
- altico 12y agocheck our yahoo q&a or quota...... they always have people posting questions.
- rudimental 12y agoKeep a running log of anything that seems missing or any problem you encounter. Extend it to people you are close to, family, friends, colleagues, people you admire. Keep this somewhere you can access easily and from everywhere, like Evernote. What problems do people have? What could be easier? What could make something better? You'll orient your mind towards problems and solutions, and before long, you'll have a long list of side projects from which to choose!
- rayalez 12y agoThere's a lot of great suggestions in this topic. Here's what I want to add: > "Serious Creativity" by Edward de Bono - excellent book on this topic. Explains a lot about inventing new ideas. > /r/SomebodyMakeThis - subreddit where people post ideas for apps and projects. > Look for new emerging markets/technologies. For example recently I've discovered for myself Ubuntu Touch - mobile OS thar is awesome and, I believe, is the future. So basically you can take any existing idea of an app for android/iOS and implement it there. That way you immediately have an infinity of new ideas. Same obviously goes for any new platform that you can build apps/projects for.
- jordsmi 12y agoUsually I try to make things that are a need in certain niches that I am into. I have no problem with projects, I just can never finish/put any of them into production
- 404error 12y agoI have hit this wall as well. Half way through a project I stop and ask myself: Who is going to use this? Does anyone have a need for this? How do I get people to use this instead of X? Can I monetize this? Half way through working a project I sometimes give up because I'm not sure I would even use it. That's the problem I'm trying to solve, figuring out what I can build that compels me to see it through and solve a real problem even if it's not MY problem.
- hashtag 12y agoI keep a list of things I want solved for personal reasons each time they come up
- dllthomas 12y agoHow do you avoid coming up with side project ideas? Want to work on some of mine?
- anmonteiro90 12y agoAre they too personal or would you be willing to share some of them?
- dllthomas 12y agoHappy to share! Anything someone else takes up is one less thing distracting me from whatever I should be focusing on. First, there's Snowdrift.coop. This is my full-time project, and I'm paying another full-time dev (less than he's worth) out of my own pocket, but we're more than happy to welcome contributions from others. An interview with my co-founder was just published in Linux Magazine: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Snowdrift.coop http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Snowdrift.coop Drop in on IRC if you want to get involved! I've also got a chore tracking site that I put together for my household, which my wife and I have been finding valuable. It needs some work before I do anything substantially public with it, but I'll share if anyone's interested. Aside from that, there are a few things I'd like to have or see explored: I'd like a notification daemon that lets me review recent messages and batch notifications by priority. I'd like to see a file system (I've been calling it "cronfs") that lets you place filesystem objects in time. Working right, you could implement cron atop this in a couple lines using dnotify to watch a "now" subdirectory. A big advantage of this is that you can trivially do level testing ("should this service be up?") instead of just the edge triggers that cron supports, but I'd also like to see what else would grow out of it. I'd like to see exploration of "genies" and an implementation of more of them. Genies are a framework (conceptual more than code, so far) for long running individual tasks requiring repeated interaction in the shell. The name is meant to invoke "not quite a daemon" or "a kind of daemon". The idea is that when you invoke a genie it registers with your shell before dropping into the background, future commands can be easily sent to the genies associated with your current shell, associated genies can be polled for updates before rendering the prompt, and the meaning of commands doesn't shift between polls/commands. I have a (hacky) libpurple client implemented this way, as well as associated scripts: https://github.com/dlthomas/genies https://github.com/dlthomas/genies Something I think would be worthwhile, but might be sticky politically/socially, is adding a couple new capabilities in terminfo and building out support in screen/tmux and enough terminal emulators to be meaningful. There's two things I would like to see here. The less controversial is a way of signalling "this is a notification, get it to the user appropriately" - which urxvt should send to dmesg, ConnectBot should turn into an Android message, screen/tmux should forward if they're able and just note if they're not, &c. More controversial is a way of rendering graphics within a subset of characters that are then still treated like characters - there have been a few attempts in this area, none has quite worked out. Rich terminals in general - historical and future -are an interesting research topic. I also have some things I'd like to blog about, but they probably are too personal to hand off, at least in the sense that explaining them in enough detail for someone else to write them would basically be writing them myself. I may add more as I think of them, but I should go do some cleaning...
- Gustomaximus 12y agoI'm the opposite, I always see opportunities. I'm marketing side of the world so I probably look at things a little differently from many here. My biggest challenges are time & reasonably priced development. I work fairly long hours and have a young family so pursing things is hard and there is only so much finance I can commit given my income is better than average but I'm not exactly rolling it it. I'm trying to find some affordable developer(s) I could fund to work for me in more affordable countries like India/Philippines/Indonesia but it's hard to find good people cheaply. I've used a guys in India for basic projects but found the quality and attention to detail on work terrible. The time cost to me on unessential back and forth was huge. I'm considering trying to find someone in the Philippines next as I've heard they can deliver better work and hopefully work a bit more independently... realised I'm ranting a bit... But for me, I spot ideas in day to day life. I generally see market opening when I find personal frustration with something. Or see something existing that could be used in a new market. The latter can be good. Look at a few new hot start-ups and think to yourself, how would this work in an entirely new markets & user-case? I keep a notebook when I spot these gaps/opportunities in the market that could be challenged. It can be frustrating when 6/12 months later you see companies forming in these niches.
- 404error 12y agoThis is great! I work for a newspaper and have thought about talking to some of our sales reps about any frustrations their clients may have expressed. I figure this would be a good place to start collecting ideas. "Look at a few new hot start-ups and think to yourself, how would this work in an entirely new markets & user-case?" I will definitely do this to try and spot some opportunities. Thanks.
- atmosx 12y agoJesus, I have more ideas that I can count, totally overflow my brain. Of course the first version is dazed and confused but over time some of those (those on whom I spend most time on) seem to come out somewhat polished... IT is only a hobby to me, but all in all, until now I'm a sucker when it comes to implementations. Most of my projects are abandoned the moment I realize that I solved the hard part and now I have to do boring part (e.g. the hard part is the back-end and boring part is the front-end which never gets finished/polished/presenable-to-thir-parties). The best way to come up with an idea, is to try to automate something in your daily life. Not something that bothers or something that someone else will find attractive. Doesn't even have to make sense to others, up to the point where it is ready. Anyway good luck :-) ps. To give an idea, I had thought of 4Square-like idea long before 4Sq. And at least 5-other things that turn-out to be startups and then big corps. But keep in mind that ideas are cheap, implementation costs.
- pratiksaha 12y agoI have wondered the same myself sometimes :-)
- vram22 12y agoInteresting question. Going to have a shot at answering it. You said: >What if nothing itches? Then the obvious thing is, find things that itch, or rather, pain, others. (It's been said on this site before. more than once.) Find processes that people do as part of their work or business, in which they have some pain, i.e. some area with friction, that potentially can be done better, using software (if they don't use any, or better software, if they do). Go to some meetups. And I don't mean tech meetups. We techies (not all) tend to live in our own echo chamber or bubble; I like to combine the two words and call it a bubble chamber, just for the heck of it - not really the same as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber So I mean business networking events. Talk to people there, introduce yourself, ask them about their business, and at least some of them will probably tell you about some problems they are having, without you even having to ask. I've seen it myself in real life. Some of the projects I've worked on, I interacted with people on the (factory) shop floor, and they often talked about issues with the existing software or with their work. Some of those issues could be made better with software.