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)
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.