If time allowed, I'd focus on the AI photo and video generation. Have seen friends hit $500 relatively quickly by targeting niches.
Sounds like a played out category, but if you look closer it's a bit of a potemkin village - many incumbents are not that good or haven't kept up with the latest models.
Each year it gets more crowded out there, but almost always room for better.
[1] https://humm.so/
I found the UX of most speech-to-text apps unnecessarily complicated, so I built Humm as a simple, privacy-first alternative.Press a custom hotkey, talk, and the text lands in whatever app you're in.- It runs locally on NVIDIA's Parakeet models - no account and no telemetry- Works on Windows and Mac- You can bring your own key if you'd prefer to use cloud models- Includes a stats page so you...
A project that I launched on HN that became a business. Simplescraper rode the no-code wave of a few years back ('instant structured data without parsing html').
Now working on increasing the surface area for AI agents: MCP support, screenshots API, and (experimentally) x402[1]
1. Go to chrome://extensions and toggle Developer mode on (so IDs are visible)
2. Select all text on the page with your mouse and copy
3. Paste it into the tool
It parses the IDs and warns you if any are among the 287 spyware extensions.
Albeit, it's a few weeks old so already in need of an update!
Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.
Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).
A few things are likely to happen:
Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.
People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.
People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.
Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.
Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.
2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better
3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best
I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.
[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1]
Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it. My latest SaaS[2] is built on Google Cloud, so Authentication, Cloud Functions, Docker containers, logging, etc straight out of the box.
Not to mention, modern JavaScript and CSS are finally good. With so many fewer headaches, it’s a great time to build.
[1] Admittedly, I was new to software dev and made some rather poor tech choices
It feels like the only areas where a solo builder can gain traction are in B2B products, or B2C if you're riding the latest trend (crypto yesterday, AI today).
Everything else requires an audience or a ton of capital if you hope to capture even a sliver of attention. Patience and persistence may get you there too, but it's going to take more than a year.
> Have any recent trends affected your business?
Not really. People need data as much as ever. As a one-person biz, the main dilemma remains how to juggle development, marketing and support. You soon reach a point where the price of context-switching between domains becomes a little too high. But that's fixable with hiring and an ok problem to have if it implies market validation.
One big trend is the increasing number of products out there - everybody's cloning errbody. The ability to build something, launch it and (hopefully) get paid for it has never been easier. That's a good thing - it's a big internet and there's enough pie for everyone - but makes it more important than ever to establish a footing asap (i.e. ramen profitability) so you can stop worrying about making rent and instead focus on shipping a better product.
Had a conversation last week with a customer that did exactly that - spent 15 minutes in chatGPT generating working Scrapy code. Neat to see people solve their own problem so easily but it doesn't yet erode our value.
I run https://simplescraper.io and a lot of value is integrations, scale, proxies, scheduling, UI, not-having-to-maintain-code etc.
More important than that though is time-saved. For many people, 15 minutes wrangling with ChatGPT will always remain less preferable than paying a few dollars and having everything Just Work.
AI is still a little too unreliable at extracting structured data from HTML, but excellent at auxiliary tasks like identifying randomized CSS selectors etc
This will change of course so the opportunity right now is one of arbitrage - use AI to improve your offering before it has a chance to subsume it.
Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say it, that didn't go far, but it did teach me how to code.
When I was close to broke (much too close) I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.
I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who really benefit from the ease and speed of the product and they're like my product team.
I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.
Learning to code was honestly one of the best decisions I've ever made. Felt like gaining wings.
For something slightly less minimal but very nice to use, I stumbled across this the other day: https://blogstatic.io/
Feels likes - after being crowded out by FB and Twitter (and the death of Google Reader) - blogs are making a comeback.
Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.
Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.
I run a no-code web scraper (https://simplescraper.io) and we test against these.
Having scraped million of webpages, I find dynamic CSS selectors a bigger time sink than most anti-scraping tech encountered so far (if your goal is to extract structured data).
Front: Vue.js, Tailwind
Back: Node.js, Firebase (Database, Hosting, Functions, Scheduler)
Management: Airtable, Github, a 30,000 word README file
An extra zero would be nice but I'm very grateful for 100. In addition to the article above, these writings provided a lot of inspiration:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20090321145348/https://plentyoff...
- https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/reconsider-41adf356857f
- https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-...
And with Puppeteer (also Playwright) it's never been easier. Recaptcha solving, Ad blocking etc. in just a few lines of code[1].
I've built a business on the back of Puppeteer - https://simplescraper.io. Ten months in and we've just passed 100 customers so there's mucho opportunities in solving these kind of problems.
[1] https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra/tree/master/pack...
But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).
With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.
I'm building https://simplescraper.io and we're trying to create heuristics to update CSS selectors whenever a website changes. People become unhappy when a scrape task that ran smoothly on Monday suddenly returns nothing on Tuesday so while it's a tough nut to crack it's super important.
We use a combination of XPath, historical data and data type (the value may change but the type and length often remain the same or similar) to narrow down the options.
Of course there's more sophisticated methods using Machine learning etc. but it's fun to try different approaches to solve this problem.
If you're not on Twitter, we hope to submit the integration by the end of this month so check us out then.
For building websites, Webflow is powerful (and allows for fine-tuning).
Among utilities, Parabola (a kind of no-code extract, transform, load tool) is very neat.
For getting data/creating APIs without having to code I've built Simplescraper - https://simplescraper.io.
Currently working on an integration for Airtable that allows you to create a dynamic CMS using any data source, without code. Hopefully useful to non-dev and lazy-dev alike.
Having a lot of fun building the product but with so many of these types of companies shutting down it has me wondering what it forebodes :/