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.
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.