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Side Project

Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

jmduke

I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year.

My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that:

  1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,
  2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements;
  3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipped to build because it reflected my own experience (support for Markdown, a REST API β€” basically developer-adjacent functionality.) 1

I think we are in general pretty awash in bad products; it is not particularly difficult to pay attention to what you use over the course of a week and see what could use some obvious improvements.

holgersindbaek

I've created an online solitaire platform (https://online-solitaire.com/) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it. It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually generate some side-income.

I did it by scraping the Mac App Store so I could find apps that had a lot of downloads and bad reviews. I figured that if an app had a lot of downloads, but got bad reviews then I could create something better and there would be an audience for it. The app ended up making enough money that I've kept it as a side-hustle for all these years. I've written about how I picked the app here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solitaire-game-to-10k-mrr-28e352c308

Footnotes

  1. People often think of 'niching down' as adding features, but I would argue it is often just as much about removing features. As companies grow, they must add more and more surface area to satisfy certain use cases. Side projects do not have this problem; they can be laser focused on one or two such use cases, and as such remove all the surface area that many users find to be detritus.Λ„