Hello friends,
I want to build something! But I have very limited time. So I was thinking if I could optimize for small, very practical ideas that I could pull off with the amount of time that I have.
Do you have any tips on how to come up with ideas for micro side projects?
Bonus if it would be possible to monetize it in any way like ads or micro payments for a very residual income.
Extra bonus if it is something simple that can improve peoples lives.
... Maybe I'm asking too much.
Thanks
This is what I do at least, it works well. It also encourages more B2B businesses than B2C. Recently I've looked into form handling for businesses, an email API that's good, an uptime monitor for my products, etc.
I was building another startup, and I stumbled across this problem of managing my images better.
And it ended up doing better than the initial product I was working on. Had I not built something in the first place, I wouldn't have known. I think it's a good example of a Micro-Side project
https://www.heyraviteja.com/post/portfolio/figmage/
My co-founder was searching for an apartment to purchase and found that all the tools he was using had weaknesses and none of them met his needs. We decided to create an aggregator for real estate offers. Initially, we intended to target users looking to buy an apartment, but we later pivoted to focus on real estate agencies and added features around this. After more than two years of part-time work on the project, we gave up as it was not sustainable for various reasons.
However, while working on that project, we had to develop a web scraping infrastructure to collect data reliably for our system. We realized that we could create a separate product based on this, which led to the development of Scraping Fish API for web scraping: https://scrapingfish.com. We understood the market and our potential users/customers well, as we were the users of the system before. It makes it easier to sell a product when you understand the market and your target audience.
You can read more about our journey on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish.
Usually life is full of little pin prick pain points like this.
1. A reddit post which showed IMDb ratings of all Simpsons episodes made me think, "what if there was a site that could do that for any TV show?". A weekend later https://theshowgrid.com was born. Building it was so much fun. I spent more time on the tooling necessary to make it a static site than the site itself.
2. I'm part of a small forum of maybe a few thousand users. There are some things a user can do there which takes some extra steps. So I built a couple of browser extensions that were well received. I only have a few hundred users but I know it matters a lot to all of them. And that makes me happy.
3. Few years ago I built a simple website for my hairstylist's charity. Not a technical challenge but it was a great way to build connections and to expand knowledge outside tech circle.
Really, there are plenty of opportunities. I'm sure you've many personal itches to scratch. That's a good starting point.
As other commenters have pointed out, your own problems can be a great starting point. Also, look for issues people around you have. Write the problems down and try to find solutions for them.
Be inspired by other people's ideas. Add them to your list. There's a bunch of fascinating ideas in this thread already. Do some of them excite you? On the list they go!
Hopefully, you'll find that ideas tend to breed. Thinking about a given problem makes you think of related ones. Or an entirely different problem with the same structure.
Add to the list until something appears that you're passionate about. Or something you think might have a good shot at earning money. Then start looking into how you can build that something.
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I have been collecting project ideas for years but only started working seriously on one of the larger ones last year.
My problem has been the opposite of yours: Choosing something to work on and sticking with it.
Partly to help myself focus, I recently made https://premature-documentation.com/ in the hope that other people might find a project to work on or share ideas for projects they don't have the time to work on themselves.
The idea is for the site to be community-driven, but I won't be able to work on functionality or look for contributors right now. So for the foreseeable future, it's going to be me offloading everything from my list of ideas until only the obviously bad ones are left ;)
You can get inspiration from here: https://github.com/topics/command-line
To be honest, I don't know how many of these projects I've thought over in my head, only to find that they either require too much time, or have already been solved.
I think satvikpendem is right, start to work on literally anything, and try to notice problems you encounter along the way, maybe a neat little project hides there..
My suggestion for "literally anything" would be some low-effort creative project, like starting to take a picture every day, or write a sentence of prose, or listen to a song you've never heard before.. And do _anything_ with the output, either put it out in the world, or keep it to yourself.. Your project may come from trying to manage it all..
My current project is a backup solution that suits me, that's build on top of zfs, it's mostly bash scripts, it might never be public.