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Re:Ask HN: How to start a successful side business by bkkk on Friday August 05, 2016 @02:14AM (#12230379)
Pick a niche market. Talk with 5 businesses in that niche market about their pain points. Discuss with them their painpoints, repeating tasks or reports. Then crystalize a problem that all of these businesses have in common. Find a freelancer that creates a quick&dirty prototype that solves the problem to some extend. Show them the prototype and have them subscribe to a 50-100$ plan. Fix all bugs in a reasonable timeframe. Now either automate more of their work, or find more people in that niche to buy your software.

Niche markets: Pick any existing popular SaaS that non techies use that have an API and some community (discussion board or forum) you can reach out to. Ecommerce: Shopify, bigcommerce, magento. Payments: stripe, wordpress, stripe, braintree. Accounting: xero, quickbooks.

- Do not code yourself, it requires great discipline. It's always more fun to code than to talk with customers. - Businesses are happy paying money even for a terrible product if it makes their lives easier. - People love to talk about their problems (aka how you can extract money from them). - There's multiple ways to start a business, this approach is just one of them. - Don't read too much blog posts and business books about online businesses. They are confusing you and holding you back. Business is a skill like programming, you learn more actually coding, than reading about how to code.

Re:Ask HN: How to start a successful side business by galazzah on Friday August 05, 2016 @05:35PM (#12235890)
So basically cold call businesses in niche markets to find out what they would pay money for, solve that problem, and profit?
Re:Ask HN: How to start a successful side business by bkkk on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:15AM (#12247913)
Basically, get a lot of domain knowledge about a market, understand your customers, etc. Build trust. Don't focus on profit initially.
Re:Ask HN: How to start a successful side business by jeremywho on Monday August 08, 2016 @09:55PM (#12252057)
Might seem like a silly question to a lot of people around here but, any tips for identifying niche markets to target?
Re:Ask HN: How to start a successful side business by 1123581321 on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @04:04PM (#12257346)
Start with what your friends and family do for a living, especially if any of them work in logistics, manufacturing, product sales, etc.