Ask HN: What's the best way to find ideas for niche paying side projects?

Talk to people. Lots of people. Anything they do with a spreadsheet (domain specific business process modeling), or requires manual copy paste from one thing to another (integrations), is ripe for disruption.

Ask for pain points and their workarounds, not peddle your solution.

Let's say they value their time at $30 an hour. You build something that helps them shave an hour a month. Some will definitely pay you that much a month.

marto1 · 5 years ago

> Talk to people. Lots of people.

On this note, consider there is a huge, very often understated, leap between "Oh, this is cool" and "Here's 20$".

tjchear · 5 years ago

Yeah, but after talking to a good number of people in a particular domain or industry, you'd have an inkling, though not guaranteed, what the core problem is and how you can solve it.

The discipline needed here, particularly by us developers, is to recognize the absolute core value proposition and to do just enough to validate it.

In the beginning, it might just be you and a sloppy script you write. No SaaS, minimal website. Your customer would have to email you to get anything done.

Once you get paying customers like that, you automate it gradually, and build out your SaaS.

"... find small niche ideas that require very little marketing (SEO driven) and take 3 weeks to build, ship and launch. It doesn't seem so hard."

Seems pretty hard to me. It's generally easy to come up with an idea. It's much harder to actually make money with one (in my experience).

conqrr · 5 years ago

I feel there lots more than what we see on HN. Countless calculator, weather and niche sites I come across who never have anything in public. Long back each niche would host a forum software and would make quite a bit through adsense. Ofcourse, Facebook etc al have pretty much killed that avenue.

giantg2 · 5 years ago

I do think there's a lot more than we see here, or that any one person can see anywhere. I also agree that ad revenue doesn't really work without substantial traffic. Really, Reddit has usurped many traditional forums.

I tried to monetize an Android app with ads and a paid version. I could never gain enough users. I had a second app with more users, but didn't want to clutter it with ads. Of course that one actually had a decent number of users, but infrequent use (designed for utility, not monetization).

altdataseller · 5 years ago

It’s very hard. That’s what happens when everyone has access to so many resources/tools to build things faster and easier than ever before. No such thing as an easy idea that pays you just 1k a month

cosmodisk · 5 years ago

Take yourself out of the tech bubble. Go to places where you mention python and people think about a snake, not the language. The detachment between what's available already and what people think is possible is often so huge.

toby_tw · 5 years ago

You hear about all the success stories online in blogs and articles. What you don’t hear about is all the failed attempts that didn’t work. There are far more of them.

Honestly, it's the same odds of doing a startup and profiting I think. I'd rather try.

soulchild37 · 5 years ago

I would say focus on building distribution / a way to reach your audience first (blog, email list, etc). Once you got distribution nailed, and sufficient understanding of your audience (and also trust of your audience), it will be easier to make a product based on their pain and persuade them your product solves their problems.

While distribution chain is as important as a product, I feel having a problem area first is the key. That's what I'm struggling with finding I believe.

What worked for me was to mingle with target audience, talk to them, observe what they post online, then the problem area will start to surface (usually multiple people will post similar problem in different time, but you will see the pattern once you have collected enough info), and then you can solve from there

visox · 5 years ago

Try https://ideasfilter.com/

Nôt sure if it helps you

dougbarrett · 5 years ago

Honestly I think right now DAPPS are probably where the low hanging fruit is for niche ideas. Lots of activity in the crypto and smart contract space.

edmundsauto · 5 years ago

Any recommendations to get started? info from google search appears to be varying quality. I would greatly appreciate benefitting from your bs filter if you have any recommended resources!

vb6sp6 · 5 years ago

Setup an eth miner and then post about how DAPPS are ripe for disruption. Let someone else do the dirty work :)