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.

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?

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.

First-to-market is overvalued. You want others to make mistakes so you can draft behind them and take over.

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.

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.

There is a lot of luck involved.

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....

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?

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)_/¯

PS: I'm not a Twitter user, but I'm familiar with the topic.

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.

>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.

I wrote a bit more about the start here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zer...

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?

I also have a "pretty good" fallback algorithm if the statement cannot be classified.

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.)

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.

Here is the full story of our product on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish

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.

I asked on the guys that runs scrapping bee but he just ignored me.

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.

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.

Thanks a lot for this project! I love it, and will be using it from now on.

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.

The reason is, bringing a product to market involves so much drudgery and success is so unlikely — you might as well have a good time.

Enjoyment will also keep you at it for longer, which can make a huge difference.

I won’t pretend my project [0] is sustaining me financially. But i’m still going after 3-4 years and I still find it “worth it”.

0. https://tatatap.com

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 :)

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.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg

[1]: https://unvalidatedideas.com/archive

I like how you commercialize it. Those ads are so relevant I went through some posts just for them and found 2 podcasts I think I'll enjoy.

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

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...

Filing my taxes is a huge pain now lol.

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

How did you market this app?

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.

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.

You can read the full story here: https://pirsch.io/blog/introduction/

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.

- Why Gumroad instead of Stripe/Paddle?

- How do you enforce licenses? Once they have the JS they can just stop paying?

- 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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

You'll get even more money if you become excellent instead of good, and relocate to a major city like SF.

I wanted to make my own but ended up making a timeline maker and have kept working on it since (markwhen.com)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565

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.

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.

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.

I can probably come up with 700 ideas in a day, but that's not what OP is asking.

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.

Mathematics, computer science, business, civilization and society advances one idea at a time. You could be part of that too.

If you're expecting me to tell you how you should earn money then I'd tell you to do some work.

part of that work is coming up with ideas. I share mine. It takes effort.

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.

When I was about 25, I saw a 40 year old man get fired. I swore I'd never care if I got fired. Seems similar to your epiphany.

The right niche or project idea is:

1. You know where to find the customers 2. You know the customers pay for similar projects 3. You can build what the customers pay for

I initially created https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists, after some years it got to ~50 stars and nice overall feedback, that's when I thought of a SaaS wrapper on top of it.

So a possible path is "idea -> open-source -> monetize". I find the first arrow to be easier to execute than a direct idea to monetization leap.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. get some product (it is not really important, what is it, could be even garbage from attic, or old things);

2. make view, who could pay for it;

3. make simplest ad;

4. talk with people who react to Your ad, try to get more info and sell, don't forget to thank;

5. gather info, analyze info, and decide, what You could change to better and if this is interest and/or profitable enough to keep doing it;

6. return to step 1.

Additionally, You could read books, talk with other business owners, learn at courses, etc, but these all are secondary.

Primary for success is doing business , gather info, analyze info, and make decisions based on real life field info.

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.

Currently, I'm exploring opportunities in the video editing space, based on pain points I experience with existing software.

[0]: https://www.bulgaro.io

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.

Site is https://beatthatflight.com.au/

I have been working on the same product for over 7 years full-time. All of our income comes from it.

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.

Went on and started creating content, here is one trade as an example: https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-ng-an-optimized-boxcar

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can check out my SHOW HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808

The idea came at the intersection on what I can write about and where I have credentials (since I didn't really have any audience).

The uniqueness of my book is that it shows everything without higher level tools.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33923137

I keep minor details in the todo notes and move to Nolific (one of mine) when I have more to say.