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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do think you're right about tech. Try it yourself, build it out, have some fun, be a dork. Then tell people.
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.
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Not sure if that was your intent but I just want to make it crystal clear that that's completely untrue.
Building good businesses and identifying profitable ideas is a skill that can be learned.
> Good business ideas jump out at you screaming
Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.
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.
Sitting down to brainstorm ideas is a lot less likely to lead to a good idea than listening over a longer period of time.
My philosophy is a tweak in that it should take months of your life and not years
Rapidly iterate ideas until you have one that fits the criteria
Never get married to a position, that applies to the shares you created at a zero cost basis too.
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!
your post makes me want to make the switch from the platforms i am using for myself and clients to yours :)
i'll definitely try it out very soon
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....
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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.
Maybe people working in the media or that however somehow monetize their twitter use?
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.
I sure have some bookmarks I never remembered to look at again.
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>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.
This is fantastic. I'm gonna check it out.
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 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.
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.
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I wrote a bit more about the start here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zer...
Currently it's a web app and I also provide a JSON API. Some details here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-13-jso...
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.)