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?
I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year.
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.
The part about 'niching down' is really important in the side-projects world, and a lot of people are missing that.
They try to build all-in-one heavy projects, hoping to provide more values than existing products.
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.
I'm going to answer for op here and point out the product exponentially self-advertises. As more people send emails using the app, even if there isn't a "Sent with Button-down" it's easy to find out the email-sender so customer's receiving the email think to themselves, I could do that, and use that nice product!
Interestingly, this is exactly how I found about Buttondown, which I've been using for years to send my own newsletter.
It also helped that it was priced way more sensibly than many alternatives, in a way that grows linearly with the number of subscribers (which is also how, theoretically, ads returns from a newsletter can grow): my then provider would meet me with a massive cliff-edge, going from $0 to about $30/month, if I recall correctly. It's a common behaviour – lock in first, then charge A LOT :)
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?
I currently make 100% of my family's income from side projects that expanded into full time gigs.
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.
I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back.
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.
I can’t agree more with the tip to never tell anyone your plans. That dopamine rush you get by discussing ideas with others quite literally is enough to never actually start anything.
Competitors are great, and how our company picks many of its projects. Lots of stuff out there has serious deficiencies, especially when it comes to UX. A not insignificant number of our projects started because someone thought some app or website was more convoluted and difficult to use than it should be.
If you don't tell anyone about your idea, how will you get customers?
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.
Clearly at some point you’ll have to share it but the point is to get building and at least get an MVP out first. If you have the mental fortitude to press on after having your idea praised or put down then that’s fantastic but realize you’re an anomaly.
Kind of funny about that last bit of advice, as that is the opposite of the advice for other creative endeavours. In https://savethecat.com/ the book talks about telling your story ideas to everyone so that your creative juices get excited.
I do think you're right about tech. Try it yourself, build it out, have some fun, be a dork. Then tell people.
Yes, I would like to stress out that it's VERY likely that there are competitors. I believe nearly everything has been already created, and the idea of finding a niche market doesn't necessarily mean to innovate and do something nobody ever ever did, but it's more about offering another perspective of it -> simplification? Modern UI? Same business problem but different solution?
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.
Even Amazon had competitors when it started. Although it was the first online bookstore, they were competing with physical bookstores. Same for Google, Netflix, and Facebook.
Yeah, but for some reason, maybe just "luck" (in the sense of "fortune"), I was always surrounded by people who google your idea and say "look at this, xyz is also doing it" which can be extremely demotivating.
That would be motivating for me. It’s validation that your idea isn’t bad. If someone is else independently thought of it, then there must be reason for it.
First-to-market is overvalued. You want others to make mistakes so you can draft behind them and take over.
Which is why it’s important that you don’t share it until you have some momentum. Then once you do just realize that many people naturally look for reasons not to put in the work, instead of the opposite. Fear of failure? Fear of wasting their time? Fear of finding out they don’t have what it takes? That it’s not all dumb luck? Who knows. Either way; just keep trucking along.
Honestly, with all skills there are people who naturally "get it" and those that naturally don't. Doesn't matter if it's programming, sports or entrepreneurship.
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.
Yes, this is true. Also, one hell of a lot of luck is needed. I know this goes against most peoples' grain, but it is true. For example, Bill Gates agreed with it. He said that his high-end schools had computers or computer time available for him. He was able to get together with other computer buffs. This would not have happened if he was in a school where this didn't exist, or he went to a school in South side of Chicago in the baddest part of town.
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.
I wonder if your argument could be made for Facebook vs Metaverse. One made it easier to connect with others, the other is a desperate move to save the business.
Agreed. I've occasionally tried using frameworks to generate ideas - none of which passed my sniff test. The really good ones come in the shower, so to speak.
I started ConvertKit (email marketing for creators) as a side hustle in 2013. In 2011 I had started blogging about my process for building iOS apps. In 2012 that turned into an email list on MailChimp and then a self-published book called The App Design Handbook (launched right here on HN).
I thought that social networks like Twitter and Facebook would drive most of the sales, but it was actually the 800 person email list I'd built. From then I became obsessed with how to optimize email marketing. I hacked MailChimp to organize lists, give away incentives for opting in, and more. But it was all hacks. In early 2013 I decided to build an email marketing tool specifically for bloggers and content creators like me.
I made it really easy to give away free incentives (ebooks, sample chapters, etc) to get subscribers, pioneered a new writing interface for time-based email sequences, and made subscriber organization really easy. It stayed a side project for two years (hitting $2k MRR and then flatlining).
In 2015 I decided to double down and make it my full time venture. From there I focused on direct sales and concierge migrations (a fancy way to say I'd do the full switch for you for free). In 2015 we grew from $2k in MRR to $98k. Then in 2016 from $98k to $500k.
Today ConvertKit is at $33M in revenue and has a team of 68, but it all started as a side project!
I've created an online solitaire platform (https://online-solitaire.com/) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it.
It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually generate some side-income.
I did it by scraping the Mac App Store so I could find apps that had a lot of downloads and bad reviews. I figured that if an app had a lot of downloads, but got bad reviews then I could create something better and there would be an audience for it. The app ended up making enough money that I've kept it as a side-hustle for all these years. I've written about how I picked the app here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....
Can you clarify how it makes 10k/mo? I don't see anywhere on the site where a person could donate/buy something, and I don't see ads. Your download also seems free. How does it actually generate any cash for you?
I built a WordPress plugin and sold it after a few years. I'm currently promoting another. Th answer the original question "how did you come up with the idea?" - I find blue ocean apps that I like and rebuild them, customized for WordPress. My first plugin with a kanban board inspired by Trello. My current plugin is Social Link Pages ( https://sociallinkpages.com ), inspired by Lintree, Carrd, etc.
I know this is usually not the best strategy for coming up with side projects but for me it's just always about solving my own problem. The downside is that I'm solving the problems mostly fellow nerds have that they usually want to solve themselve instead of paying someone to do it for them. What I'm trying to do more actively now is to always keep my eyes open at my day job and try to spot problems that are solved by excel sheets or a lot of manual work.
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.
Not at all a critic of your idea/tool, but I am surprised (this probably shows how old I am getting) that there can be (many) people willing to spend 10 $/month for a weekly report of twitter bookmarks.
Maybe people working in the media or that however somehow monetize their twitter use?
I understand what you are saying and I felt the same way. I think as a tech person you always undervalue your products as you see it as “something I could build in a weekend”, which is very different to how other people see it. There’s many Twitter tools in the same price range and the feedback from people I got is that they are happy to pay that.
I don't know, I don't even have (never had) a Twitter account, so I completely fail to see any particular utility in the whole stuff (I mean Twitter), but since everyone went on the barricades against the 7.99, no wait 11 if via Apple ;), blue mark/whatever recent idea I figured that Twitter users were philosophically against a paid for subscription.
I actually ran a similar service maybe 10 years ago, as I wanted a way to find links I had tweeted. It just presented a web page of the links you have mentioned, it didn't send a newsletter.
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)_/¯
The problem with that idea is not having to pay in general, but the fact that you can buy a symbol associated with being trustworthy for a very low price. Which had the result of fake accounts buying it and damaging actual companies with their tweets.
PS: I'm not a Twitter user, but I'm familiar with the topic.
You need to consider that you don't have to get everyone on Twitter using your tool... if you can get 500 people paying $10 a month you're making $50k a year...
We're working on https://tweetsmash.com that aims to streamline consuming high-signal information from Twitter. It can help you setting up weekly/daily email digests from bookmarks. Furthermore, it can also help fine-control what tweets gets into a digest. Like you can have separate digest for Business, or Development, or just Recent bookmarks.
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.
Sounds like the next feature idea for Twitter Blue or whatever it's called now. Usually it's why you don't make these kinds of services because the company can just make it's own iteration.
That’s always a risk with building on any platform. The benefit of building on them is the reach but it can also take away your selling point. In that case you usually have to double down on features that are too power user specific and unlikely to be added by the platform themselves. It’s always a double sided sword.
It seems like a really specific niche. These people use bookmarks a lot, probably to manage a big chunk of the information they consume. If you see this much value in this tool it seems like an easy jump to pay a few bucks to make your use of it more effective.
I sure have some bookmarks I never remembered to look at again.
>"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.
Thanks! I'm actively working on it and recently added full text search across your bookmarks which is something not available on Twitter right now (and was fun to build, which is the factor I mostly optimize for in my side projects)
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 make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements.
I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.
Wow, I've been doing this for nearly 10 years with multiple banks and auto-mergjng the output into my accounts, as well as to update memberships of an organisation using membership fee transactions from those files.
It never occurred to me to think of offering it to others through a front end, or that there's a side income's worth of interest in that kind of bank PDF scraping.
A fun thing I discovered doing this was when my software reported some mismatch errors when I merged in a bank-generated PDF for a date range partly overlappong what I'd already loaded. Turns out the bank PDFs were missing a random subset of transactions over a large date range - as was the online banking transaction history! This went on for a few months until the bank fixed their systems.
I started off by buying Google Ads, but I lost money running them. Eventually I stopped running the ads and focused on writing blog posts. Also I think the domain sort of helps.
Question for ya if you don't mind: I had to do some PDF scraping a while back as part of a side project collecting alternative social/economic datasources.
Even within a single site, there were often errors at the fringes, especially if things like layout/styling changed, and my concern about giving bad data to users (or needing to constantly be checking data quality and adjusting custom parameters for each target site) held me back from ever feeling confident enough to convert it into a paid product.
I don't mean for you to give up your secret sauce here, but wondering if you ran into this same issue, and what your approach was from a business/customer expectations perspective?
Oh yes I ran into this issue many many times. The way I dealt with it is a bit insane. I classify bank statements using images or text on the first page. Then I run custom code for that document type.
I also have a "pretty good" fallback algorithm if the statement cannot be classified.
Usually banks have a template so the edge cases aren't so edgy. Had to do this with Canadian banks and each one had their own template, but once you parsed it, generally, it worked until they updated their template again.
My father asked me to create Windows apps for the hospital department where he worked as a doctor (calculating drug dosages and the nutritional needs of preterm infants). I figured that there might be others with a similar need and eventually created a SaaS app builder that is currently my full-time job. It's been almost 20 years since that original request. https://www.calcapp.net/blog/2018/04/09/launching-after-15-y...
Thanks. I did lots of other things in parallel during the early years. I left my last consulting gig in 2014, so I have been doing in full-time since then.
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.)
Problem oriented mindeset - I agree with other posts in this thread to get into the YC/problem solving mindset where you are on the lookout for problems. Mindset comes first and understanding how to think about problems will amplify any actions you take.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting point.
As far as I know, it's not that easy. We have a client who contacted the owners of the website he needs to scrape and offered to pay them for access to their data but they were not interested. I know that they are not their competitor and they're not doing anything that would harm their revenue in any way. I assume that they figured it was not worth the legal, organisational and other formal hassle to share their data.
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.
https://changedetection.io - identified a niche where there was only closed source solutions that were _extremely_ expensive for what it is, and all other opensource products seemed very 'under-cooked' and talked more about the technology (language, web framework etc) they used rather than the problem they solved.
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.
Nicely done. This is a commonly needed utility, obviously most relevantly in spaces where the purveyors of data aren't in the business of nor are they interested in making the data available or easily consumable. When I worked at a hedge fund doing research on various sectors, we had tons of data points we needed to monitor. Some of them were only available on government agency or company websites. Being able to detect when something changed, and quickly, was obviously really important for us. Anyways, good job commercializing this and doing it in a way that will feel palatable to customers.
I used it this Black Friday to monitor prices on some websites where I couldn't find a better solution. I was glad it supports multiple types of notifications (I used Discord notifications)
Thanks a lot for this project! I love it, and will be using it from now on.
I've done three money makers... the thing all have in common is I showed someone something I was working on, and they said they'd buy it:
1. I wrote some embedded software and got paid a royalty on every device shipped. Wasn't much per device, but it added up to thousands per year for about 20 years.
2. Started a niche credit card processor and it's made money for 15 years.
3. Put a bunch of T-shirt designs (featuring silly cartoons for error messages) on craft sites. It made money, but fashion burns out quickly compared to code.
Right now, I'm working on something I've always wanted to do, and haven't had time for since the early 90s... writing a game. We'll see how it goes.
Yes, "enjoyable" is a good metric. Because many projects take a lot of energy (years!) before you could commercially profit.
For me I would also add "usefulness" as requirement or like you say it has to be still "worth it" (commercially or learning stuff etc).
I had several side projects for years, but various realistic evaluations (competition, market size, production maturity, progress) then led me to the conclusion that I had to stop as they got less useful for me. But stopping them is very tricky when you "enjoy" them :)
YC has an excellent video on this that's out just recently (from SUS 2022):
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.
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
I originally started putting ads on my blog after people started being an asshole about my articles on Hacker News, originally scoped to only readers from Hacker News. That combined with Patreon pays for all my hosting costs (even the CDN on fly.io and my random AWS infrastructure) and all the video games I play (about $280 US per month of income). It's gotten to the point where it's a tax burden, but I think it's worth it. I've never had a side project make an actual profit before and I'm excited to keep writing as a way to hone my skills and get experience with even more fun technology.
My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!
It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!
I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...
It allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes.
Idea: my own pain both individually and when working with team. When you create any kind of app you often need some video of it, either for promo, landing, social media posts, tutorials, etc.
It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI changes quickly.
Then I have seen stripe profile on Twitter and their promo videos and thought "how much of this video could be done automatically basing only on mouse movement and clicks info" and boom.
As a good entrepreneur I started by getting a domain of course. I got a really good one - screen.studio so I had to instantly start working on MVP
This looks great. I'm currently working on some screencasts on technical topics. Is this suited for something like that? These are videos of 30-60 minutes length, a lot of time spent in terminal, editor, web pages. Or is this really meant more for product glamour shot type videos?
Currently it might not be great for that just because of performance issues it could have when auto generating 30 minutes long animation. Tho it is on my radar as it is relatively common use case
Brilliant! I spent so long looking for a screen recording app that could simply follow the mouse and zoom automatically. Thought of building this myself. Good job executing on it so well. Will probably be a customer soon :)
I like games but hate almost all mobile games, IAP and ads monetization, and how brainless the industry is. I looked for single player chess variant apps and found the offerings really spotty. The chess app market is oversaturated so I knew nobody was coming to save me. I started during 3 months of unemployment, then got a job with a brutal public transit commute. So I made ChessCraft for myself, mostly. So pretty standard advice: make something you know and want.
I was looking for an embedded analytics solution for my website in Golang. I couldn't find one so I built one myself, which I later turned into a product. We've been called "copycats" many times, but we actually didn't look at the market :D Except for Google Analytics, which I didn't want to use because it would have required a cookie banner.
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.
I browsed the Envato / CodeCanyon popular products section looking for a product that enough people were buying and I felt confident about being able to build an improved version of.
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.
- 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.
First tried to release my product on Envato but the market turned out to be a race to the bottom and it wasn’t sustainable, couldn't get past $3K per month without drowning in support tickets.
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.
That sounds really amazing! Would you be willing to share how you marketed your product - once you moved to selling from your own website? Certainly a big challenge is trying out an idea, but the next challenge is scaling adoption to make some worthwhile money. (By "scaling", i'm not referring to hypergrowth, web company scale....just, you know, maybe a side hustle or even making a modest full-time livelihood.)
Built a good product page with good keywords. I’ve also done some affiliate marketing which helped a lot with generating relevant traffic.
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.
I think about the guy who built remoteok.com and his suite of sites. They are all "open" in the sense that he publishes some basic financials. It's fascinating to see how things grow over time. Most of the time projects take a long time to generate anything substantial.
I built very simple tool in an industry that I wanted to be part of and was surprised to find that a few people wanted to pay for it. I mean very basic - done in three days.
A few months improving that and soaking up everything I could find (newsletters/press/blogs) led me to noticing a larger opportunity in the same industry so I built that and now it supports me full-time.
So I would advise picking an industry or niche that you're interested in (preferably one that's growing and not particularly tech-savvy) and then spend some time reading up on what people in that industry talk, write and complain about. There are opportunities everywhere.
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
This memory goes back almost thirty years. In 1993, most products still shipped on floppy disks, and costs were increasing as products grew in size. Shrinking a popular product by even one disk could save over a million dollars. Publishers were using data compression but the tools were of the same class that were intended for regular users. That is, compression and decompression required roughly similar compute resources. I noted a few things:
1. Software products would be compressed just once but decompressed millions of times.
2. It should be possible to create an asymmetric codec that expended tremendous resources on compression but still kept decompression light.
3. Publishers didn't care how much compute compression would require as long as it was still tractable and would save them money. If they had to buy an expensive computer and let it run overnight it would be fine.
I didn't know anything about compression at the time but the premise seemed strong. I took unpaid time off to tackle this problem and in a few months (after a lot of trial-and-error learning) I began to have a workable product.
Borland, Novell, and Microsoft (for the .CAB files) were the first licensees. The compressor was called Quantum and was typically 20-30% better than PkZip. My sales technique was to take a product, recompress it with Quantum, and show the company how much money they could save. (As I recall, I was able to demonstrate reducing Windows for Workgroups by two disks.)
Two different streams that have built up over time. I spend less than 10 hours combined weekly on them averaged over a month if i had to guess but both were independent full time jobs at one point
1) ($$m total, $$k/mo now) Server hosting! This started off as hosting game servers for friends in early high school. It expanded to friends of friends for awhile before I pivoted more towards crypto mining (yes I know, young kid with dubious ambitions). Lots of my first software experience was here. I wrote some software for switching the processes between mining/game hosting across the different boxes (raw processes on servers, the horror). Nowadays it’s winding down as just game hosting and some scientific computing rental to a few universities/their robotics clubs. It’s still slightly profitable but I have no interest in updating servers (CPUs from 2013-2015, GPUs mostly re-sold except for what a few people requested) and it runs everything via containers now.
2) ($$k/mo) Sports film review. I wrote the first version of this my first year of college which was a way to keep the stats book for basketball and football games and stitch the actions with the video footage. We had customers throughout ~20 states primarily high school but some colleges as well. In fact it still runs at a lot of them, but I’m not really connected with managing of it anymore. My co-founder still runs it and we rotate a few students from our alma-matter in as interns and occasionally juniors on it.
This became the basis for an esports version of the software that I created a few years ago. This time with CV to do all the gathering of stats and allowing for jumping around in videos and analyzing overall stats from the output. This started in Call of Duty for their then new professional league but expanded out to Halo, Rocket League and Valorant since. I still do some occasional retraining of the models but the product itself got acqui-hired by a larger company for which I still “consult”
EDIT: I’ve also had many more that cost me more money than they ever made, but I’m a big proponent of failing fast and iterating
Here’s what you do. Come up with an MVP that does one very common workflow for your target market. Choose any market you’re familiar with.
The MVP workflow needs to be good enough that cold outreach would respond. “Oh I do that in my day job, I’ll take a look”
Then demo to them.
They will tell you why they can’t or won’t buy. They will say it needs X or Y or they will ask questions, “can you integrate with Google sheets?” You’ll probably do 50 of these and most won’t buy… but they will tell you either directly or indirectly why not. Now focus on removing the road blocks.
Just keep implementing features until the questions people have are already answered in the demo. People stop asking about features and start asking about pricing.
That’s the path I’ve taken and seems to work well.
Can I just offer an alternative? What if we all pushed back and didn't accept low wages? It's been going on for far too long and just accepting it and starting side hustles is very defeatist.
In order to not accept terms of an agreement, you need a reasonable alternative. Being able to start your own business that makes money is a good alternative.
You’ll never out-wage bringing value to the market in terms of making money. I have no idea how side-hustles are “defeatist”, when almost no one has the privilege of just “not accepting” to make money in lieu of some wishful thinking to somehow strong-arm companies into giving more money to people.
I run Maker Stations (https://makerstations.io) — the newsletter about workspace tours from creators and makers. Launched in 2021. We’re currently at about 12k monthly sessions and $200 MRR (not much, I know).
I love WFH and having my own private space where I can concentrate. Offices are fun in their way, but I always struggled to focus in a noisy, open environment.
Ironically, I’d normally listen to white noise while WFH, because I can control the volume!
That (and a famous virus thing that made us stuck at our homes) prompted me to look for some desk inspiration.
I had a blast browsing home office setups on Reddit, but... I always wanted to learn more about the makers behind them. Pictures weren't enough.
That’s how I came up with this idea.
Oh, and our design takes its inspiration from early 1990s computer magazines — with their adorable naivety, optimism, warmth, and energy.
What a coincidence. I was trying to remember your site but couldn't. Searching HN didn't help either. So I made an account and posted an Ask HN.
Now a few more searches on your site to look for the post I half-
read last time.
Nice effort. Keep it up.
During busy and stressful times it becomes clear what the bottlenecks are. So place yourself under incredible stress and see what things you are suddenly wishing for.
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.
Journal your ideas meticulously. Everyday, just get a README.md on GitHub in a private or public repository and journal ideas.
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.
All it takes is one to create a single side hustle.
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.
Thanks for being interested enough to ask. I create a new GitHub repository and add a number to the end.
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.
I run OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com), I spend roughly two hours per workday building features, marketing, or doing customer support.
For me, it started by working for a company that was incapable of keeping their graphql service online, so I built an uptime monitoring service for graphql, and eventually generalised it to work for all APIs and web apps.
How did I do it? Just consistent effort over a long time.
In your website's pricing page, the word "scales" is strike-through in "Pricing that scales with your business", this doesn't seem to be intentional...
The word probably meant to be underlined, and the corresponding tailwind CSS class is missing.
Tested in Firefox and Chrome, on linux and android devices.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when thinking about making money with a side project is to think it has to be a revolutionary, game changing product to make money. Most people cannot fathom how much money is being spent online every minute (it's about $10.4M per minute just on ecommerce alone). You barely have to dip your pinky finger into that stream to make a living.
I made a mac app called Presentify (https://presentify.compzets.com) just at the right time when covid started and when most were working remotely.
I had this idea well before covid because when I was explaining something to others over a call (via screen share) I wished I had something to draw on the screen and highlight a few things to articulate my thoughts better. However, I never invested time to develop an app for this until Covid. This remote work saved me travel time which I decided to utilise to make the app.
So, in short, I got the idea from the problem I faced personally. Luckily, I received overwhelming response from Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938604) and Reddit community and this has encouraged me to invest more time to the app and make it better.
https://gifmemes.io makes about 200-300 USD a month and the idea was very straightforward. I wanted to make a cool meme, but found out motion tracking the text was difficult.
I've been self-publishing science fiction romance on the side. I started doing it when switching jobs in the middle of the pandemic a couple of years ago, and being really stressed about going from a stable position where I spent almost eight years to a probation period. I figured doing something totally creatively different that made a tiny bit of income might distract me and help me manage the anxiety levels. And it worked! The job turned out great, but so did the fiction writing.
An invoice passed over my desk one day many years ago that charged us 30% to get some money back. Started to investigate it and found that there was an opportunity.
I'm on the hardware side, so this may or may not be relevant to your question but I'll share it anyway.
I run CAD Class (https://www.cadclass.org) as well as a small 3D print farm selling custom clips and connectors for workshop equipment.
CAD Class was born out of my frustration with inadequate CAD learning resources online. When I was learning I had trouble finding a class that truly got me where I wanted to go (I wanted to develop and sell my own products). Classes I found were:
1 - Not comprehensive enough or just flat out boring
2 - Not supported by a community who could answer my questions in a reasonable timeframe in a way I understood
3 - Outdated due to software updates
4 - Lacking the right learning structure to truly advance my skillset
I built CAD Class to be the ultimate online learning resource. A kind of one-stop-shop for students learning CAD and wanting to build their dream projects.
For the print farm, I was simply scratching my own itch. I designed a few highly specific and hard to find adapters to solve a dust collection problem I was having. I realized that nobody had advertised adapters for specific equipment and that they were all generic and therefor hard to search for. The innovation here was not so much the product as it was the ease of searching for it.
Lastly, since it seems you're not sure what to make, I don't see any reason to force it. I'd suggest joining another small team or company, or simply taking a job that keeps you occupied until you come up with something you are genuinely excited about working on. I took a job with a community college teaching CAD, consulted with a few museums and startups, and wandered until I nailed down my idea. There's something to be said about keeping momentum.
Started making simple games in college, later started making simple apps and games. Figured out ways to monetize them later. Most of the money comes from a small niche users for app / small number of regular players for games. So basically I build stuff for fun and later pivoted a bit to monetize them, like adding extra features or selling ad space.
Very interesting! If you're willing to share, I'm hoping you can elaborate a bit more. Do you make apps/games that you want? Or do you target specific genres? How do you choose?
New job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen.
I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light.
That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came.
If you ever used an external monitor, you know how cumbersome it is to adjust the brightness constantly using its physical buttons or touch controls. And macOS doesn't provide any way to change the brightness from the Macbook, unless you use something expensive like an Ultrafine or Studio Display.
So I started working on an app to automatically adjust the brightness based on the sun position in the sky.
This is most popular mistake of people, to think about business, or to discuss it, instead of do.
Because idea is nothing, but implementation is all. History know many fails with exceptionally good ideas, and much less number of successes, where idea was moderate, but with good implementation.
And "book" knowledge at beginning is Your enemy, because book written in past, but You will implement in future, when old knowledge could become obsolete. Later, You will find ways to use obsolete knowledge.
Best friend of business is real field business experience. Also good, to find right partner, who have business experience.
I like solving problems that I encounter, with the assumption that others may have similar issues. When I moved to Bulgaria, I wanted to learn Bulgarian online, but I couldn't find any good resources for it (since it's a relatively niche language). So, I built my own learning platform [0]. I created an MVP and ran a few Facebook ads, and it was quickly confirmed that many other people were interested in a resource like mine.
Currently, I'm exploring opportunities in the video editing space, based on pain points I experience with existing software.
I was constantly looking for flights. Cheap flights. It was my obsession (I've visited 80 countries pre-covid) and friends came to me for hacks/cheap flights.
So I started a website/blog/newsletter. Then I added a widget to sell flights. Then I integrated a fully fledged flight search tool. Niched on the Australian market. Then I added hotels.
Revenue fell off a Grand Canyon-like cliff when covid struck, obviously, as nobody was flying, but has improved markedly this year.
My decade long journey of trading:
Beginning of my career at IBM I was doing processor and system simulations (Cell, PowerPC).
We developed a simulation method there, which was published as: "Mesoscale Performance Simulations of MultiCore Processor Systems"
Meanwhile in an other dimension my uncle tried his luck with trading, without much success. I realised that simulators
and backtesters are related and that made me interested trying out trading algos.
Learned about StatArb from Ernie Chan's books, created my own version (now open source at https://github.com/tibkiss/huba-v1)
and slowly started trading it. It didn't win or lose much either. Later, I found Quantopian and extended their
engine to be able to trade live, on-prem (https://zipline-live.net). Ported my StatArb to zipline-live,
still limited succes. Finally moved to QuantConnect, similar result. Tried other algos (mean reversion, momentum),
which seemed to work better (in bull market).
Started my sabbatical in 2020 to focus on trading and to learn more about statistics and options.
I found that premium of options (theta decay) can be successfully extracted via income strategies.
The tricky part there is to not to kill yourself with leverage and learn to hedge your position.
Learned that majority of the folks are using manual backtesting using a Windows based software, what I also tried.
I realized that backtesting one year manually takes approximately 1 hour. Very useful, but super time consuming.
I decided to create a purpose built descriptor for Options Trading to expedite the process.
Bought options data, implemented the backtester using similar approach what we used at processor and cloud simulations:
Model what's really important and use good enough approximations for the rest. MesoSim was (re)born.
Shared the Service with groups of similar interest, they found it useful to expedite their options trading process.
In the last 6 months had a couple of thousand visitors and a solid set of paying customers now.
This is just a backtesting tool enables users to experminet with various strategies. I'm using it actively so do others (retail and small hedge-funds).
I solved a problem in my workplace. As in, people were bookings rooms using a book. So I made a booking system.
Have a think about problems people are solving with spreadsheets. This may give you some ideas.
Also consider integrations. For example, I have another product which exports timetable data from spreadsheets to Google Calendar. Why are people putting timetable data in spreadsheets? That's not the problem I am getting paid to solve :-)
I make several thousands of dollars a year there even though recently I've had to take some extended time away due to my wife's health and newborn son.
I thought I would run out of ideas for videos but putting stuff out there sparks new ideas and once it got going it's been an enjoyable process that I look forward to returning to.
I've read these money-making materials for 2 years, I don't think there's any answer that actually answer to why it doesn't work .. including this "how to come up with idea" question which is a "why I can't come up with good idea" question. With enough reading, I start to realize those are at best some heuristics for your "actually doing things in brute-force manner". If many lessons are actually working, the "90-95% fail" might be reduced to 60% by now.
I built something that I wanted and knew I would have paid for: https://divjoy.com ($5-10k/month)
If I was looking for a side hustle now I'd 100% be playing with GPT-3/ChatGPT and building small tools. There's a good chance your first few experiments won't catch on, but that you'll end up being in the right place at the right time, see an opportunity, and already have the code/knowledge to get an MVP out quickly.
I have made my money online by specifically not trying to make money. I only work on things I'm interested in, have experience with, or am good at, and the money comes afterward.
In terms of finding project ideas, perhaps try looking beyond top-of-mind B2C ideas (e.g. a mobile app, a clothing brand, an Etsy shop selling art, etc.). Those are highly competitive areas.
Many times it's easier to make money by selling something to people trying to make money themselves. So, in most cases, B2B or business-to-prosumer.
During the pandemic I created an online, multiplayer version of the domino-based game, Mexican Train (https://mexicantrain.online). Ads didn't do much, so I switched to donations. It got quite popular during lockdowns. It's leveled off a bit now, but still generates more than beer money through donations every month. People are very generous.
It’s hard for someone like me. I have to work hard to not work on purely fun projects vs purely for cash. My current project hits the sweet spot of helping people generate unique images from thought (stable diffusion) and make money, and I try to give as much of it away for free as possible :) https://88stacks.com
I worked in a product development consultancy and a few of us decided to build our own escape room as an entry into the company's "startup accelerator". The company was thoroughly unimpressed with that as a money-making prospect and refused to fund it, but by that time we'd gone and tried a couple of local escape rooms ourselves. We found them to be fun but so undeniably crap that we were immediately convinced we could build something ten times more exciting.
Without much more thought than that, we did. One of the older and more financially capable of us decided he could use a bigger shed anyway, and rented a warehouse where we built our first game. We convinced ourselves the route to money making was to automate everything and thus never have to pay game-masters to run things, so I wrote a heap of python to network raspberry pis together and have them listen to and actuate hardware in the rooms. I wrote a DSL so that we could write more or less plain-english "stories" that would make the hardware do things when the players did things, accounting for there being multiple players and the potential for out-of-expected-order actions. We did all of this in a couple of evenings a week over the course of a year or so. We expected to then find the right venue and build this game and a few more there.
I don't entirely remember how but I bumped into someone at a gaming expo who led me to my country's largest entertainment venue company, and they sent a bizdev guy to check us out. Within a couple of years we'd sold them over a dozen rooms and became responsible for a decent percentage of their total revenue, all while taking a reasonable cut. I think I worked a two month period at about three days a week to get our first venue operating, but other than that I held a different full-time job the whole time.
Fast forward another few years and we've survived COVID and have opened our own venue with what is probably the best escape room in the world. Definitely in the top-ten. My co-founder works on the business full-time, along with a few others now. We're still entirely self-funded and are profitable with just this first room. Our next rooms in the venue go pretty-much straight to the bottom line.
---
So to answer the actual question - we just built something that people wanted. And that we wanted to see exist. The first part is bog-standard Paul Graham advice, but the second part is important too. We wanted it to exist so we were motivated to keep at it until it worked. Paraphrasing the common cliché; it's taken us seven-ish years to become an overnight success.
I started https://www.tryethernal.com which is pretty niche (developer tooling for blockchain developers). I needed this tool when I got into Solidity development, and after a few hours of googling something like that, I couldn't believe it didn't already exist, so I built it.
It started as a solution for myself, i.e. a tool of convenience.
I made it available for free as an endpoint, and then it gained enough popularity to frequently hug my server into submission. After speaking with a few users, it turns out they were happy to pay for it. So I made it a SaaS!
I've enjoyed growing it over time, and seeing how others use it.
Remove your focus from making money. Direct yourself at getting better at skills in a generalized way. Indirectly I've learned a lot from my supplementary projects, which supplements my core skillset. My result serendipitously is profit although that's not my target
I like Stephen King's advice. He says he doesn't keep a writer's notebook, because that's where you can immortalize bad ideas. The good ideas stick around in your head, and that's what he decides to work on. So, specifically not writing down your ideas can lead you to the best ideas.
I create a todo list of these right now and move the ones I’m most excited about to the top of the list. The caveat is that I’ve created a lot of things I personally use frequently but not a lot of other people use them and/or I haven’t monetized them.
I keep minor details in the todo notes and move to Nolific (one of mine) when I have more to say.
Just pick one. Focus on that. It doesn't matter which one, it's the execution that causes most ideas to be successful. If that one idea doesn't work after a year of focused effort try something else.
i started https://hourly.fyi about a month ago. it was inspired by a reddit post asking for such a thing to exist. i didn’t think it would get a large response right away but a couple advertisers have reached out and i’m beginning to talk to them.
Haha sorry this comment was not useful to you folks, I just thought that this could be the logical next step to find great problems waiting to be solved. I really feel that getting an outsider view can help uncover issues that could be the starting point for great ideas. All other advices are also very good but it falls down to: find a problem and enough people sharing it so you can monetize a solution.
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.