Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business?

Posted by latch on Monday January 02, 2012 @09:23AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I built http://little.io/ over the holidays and I'm wondering whether you guys think there's a business there. The idea is to provide common small features as a service (micro-services). (actually, I started in november but had to drop it for a while)

The inspiration came from a Show HN post a while back for http://www.mapcrunch.com/. I noticed that you could vote for your favorite image and sort by most voted...I wondered how often that same code has been written and will be written. When I showed it to a friend, he pointed me to http://parse.com which is similar (you could call them a micro-service provider for mobile developers, whereas little.io is for web developers).

Anyways, I suck at business and all that, and I'm a pessimist, I personally don't see it, but I thought I'd get some input :)

( 7 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by md1515 on Monday January 02, 2012 @11:09AM (#3416299)

Well because you are just helping customers implement certain small features, I'd say you might have a niche consulting position here. Market it like that 1 feature = $X, any 2 features = $Y, and 3 or more features implemented = $Z

From your use case it just seems like you know how to add a few features and will be implementing with companies/sites that need them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by latch on Monday January 02, 2012 @09:23AM (#3415969)

http://little.io (clickable)

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Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by MattBearman on Saturday January 07, 2012 @08:20AM (#3436941)

Why was this down voted, I'm viewing on a mobile, and having a clickable link is a massive time saver compared to copy and paste with a touch screen. It's an upvote from me :)

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Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by guruz on Monday January 02, 2012 @11:37AM (#3416390)

I like the idea very much.

I'm not sure I would use them, I might be too afraid about your service's stability and how long it will be alive etc since you are not (yet?) a big name.

Another micro service idea: geolocation API

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Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by marquis on Monday January 02, 2012 @11:44AM (#3416415)

Yes, we are currently looking for a good geolocation API. If we have to built it ourselves I suppose we could monetize it..

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Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by crikli on Monday January 02, 2012 @09:43AM (#3416033)

I don't get it. Can you provide an example use case?

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Re:Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business? by latch on Monday January 02, 2012 @09:59AM (#3416074)

Each service is independent (you might only use 1 of them, or all X)..but tagging is probably the simplest to explain.

Say you run a site that display videos and you want people to be able comment on certain parts. You'd hook into the the tagging api to let users tag the videos.

Here's a working demo..you can click on the tag that I added, or add your own.. http://little.io/playground2

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