Ask HN: What's the best way to find ideas for niche paying side projects?

Re:Ask HN: What's the best way to find ideas for niche payin... by tjchear on Thursday August 26, 2021 @05:02PM (#28320719)

Talk to people. Lots of people. Anything they do with a spreadsheet (domain specific business process modeling), or requires manual copy paste from one thing to another (integrations), is ripe for disruption.

Ask for pain points and their workarounds, not peddle your solution.

Let's say they value their time at $30 an hour. You build something that helps them shave an hour a month. Some will definitely pay you that much a month.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What's the best way to find ideas for niche payin... by marto1 on Saturday August 28, 2021 @11:41AM (#28338907)

> Talk to people. Lots of people.

On this note, consider there is a huge, very often understated, leap between "Oh, this is cool" and "Here's 20$".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What's the best way to find ideas for niche payin... by tjchear on Sunday August 29, 2021 @07:54AM (#28345981)

Yeah, but after talking to a good number of people in a particular domain or industry, you'd have an inkling, though not guaranteed, what the core problem is and how you can solve it.

The discipline needed here, particularly by us developers, is to recognize the absolute core value proposition and to do just enough to validate it.

In the beginning, it might just be you and a sloppy script you write. No SaaS, minimal website. Your customer would have to email you to get anything done.

Once you get paying customers like that, you automate it gradually, and build out your SaaS.

[ Parent | on HN ]