Ask HN: What is your viable aka money making startup or side project idea?

Ok, here's an idea:

Make a content channel which is for nothing but curated ad content. In other words, advertisers only get to post their ad if it is judged entertaining or informative enough to count as content. Of course, they pay for accepted content. The audience is attracted by the interesting ads.

This channel would compete with some aspects of YouTube (those ads that are interesting enough to get 10 million YouTube views). The idea is that by providing a curated mix of ads with no repetitive play, that it would be entertaining enough to be an entertainment destination on its own. Instead of a channel creating or purchasing interesting content to attract an audience, the curation and presentation of the ads is the value which is added.

In the ideal case, it becomes a 24/7 channel of nothing but superbowl ads. Wouldn't you or some of your friends want to watch that?

A) A simple financial options trader for hot ideas.AKA - trading weekly options on Netflix, or facebook. $ could also be pooled so smaller than 1 option positions could be taken. I know a lot about finance and could help you make this tool.

B) An email sorting tool. Assigning importance scores to emails and then having the email predict where you want incoming emails to be in your list (higher scores = near the top)

C) A tool for entering your course list, and having the page find all of the cheapest markets to buy your books from. Then transacting the total deal from one webpage.

Message me if you want me to discuss further any of these ideas. These are rather simple ideas that could make a good side project. If we actually get something done, I have much bigger projects.

I used bigwords.com in school, which is similar to C. While you enter your books rather than your course list, it then searches a ton of retailers to find the best combination. I generally found the results to be much better than what I'd find on my own.

An email sorting tool

There is no contact info in your profile... I'm interested in the email idea, check out https://github.com/alain94040/coolbox for my own list of ideas regarding email.

cool its clamb777@gmail.com - email me if you want to talk about it more.

I'm looking over your stuff and I like where your ideas are headed. You cover a lot of topics in your write up on Github. My thinking has been towards a much smaller feature set, specifically one that would help the most busy people who need the product most. After this has been achieved with a solid market share of the target market, then we begin adding additional features.

One of the major hurtles, is that email is intrinsically different for everyone. A great email solution is one accepts this natural hurtle and uses it to create an economic moat against the inevitable competition.

While I am not an expert in email or programming for email software, I have developed a feature set and interface that I believe would solve these email issues.

This project is important to me, because I think it would not only improve my life and productivity, but the lives of many others who are enslaved by emails.

1) 99 Designs for Voice Acting.

Particularly for videogames / commercial video production, there's a lot of small parts that are strictly scripted, and where I'd imagine it's inefficient to spend a lot of time searching through voice actors' portfolios when what you really want is just to hear a good take.

2) WordPress-native, content-aware, publisher-friendly analytics

There's a big gap in analytics software for analytics that are tightly integrated with the CMS, and focus on providing insights about content, not just pages. The same piece of content appears in many forms, in many places across the site, for varying lengths of time. How does content length affect bounce rate? How long should content stay in a particular slot before it starts getting diminishing returns on traffic? How much traffic do articles with a particular tag typically get within their first week since publishing vs their first year?

Most publishers would be totally unable to answer those questions without a month-long data integrations effort from multiple sources (assuming they've done some of the setup work with something like Google Analytics event-tracking to have the data in the first place), even though it has big implications for everything from site layout to editorial guidelines to long-tail traffic potential for content around a topic.

3) Street team marketplace, dynamic printing, and verification system as an app.

An elance-for-street-team-members site that could let companies post 'missions' for people in any major metro or college campus who want to do street team tasks, who have signed up through an app. Flyer posting, handouts, chalking, etc. Street teamers verify their work with the app through a combination of photos and location-tracking during the time they mark they're working on a mission.

Companies could optionally use the marketplace's software to create the flyers or handouts, which allows for the marketplace to both make sure it's print-shop ready and provide dynamic URLs / QR codes unique for each flyer or handout, for additional verification and results tracking.

I hate to tell you, but this isn't a good way to go about looking for ideas. Either:

A.) The people who have ideas don't want to share them, especially for a nebulous offer to compensate them a "good amount at [your] discretion". Is that $100 or $100,000? It's a worse gamble than the lottery, especially if nothing is in writing beforehand.

B.) The idea should be the least of your concerns. You're looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing.

Now that I've said the harsh words, let me try to help you out.

You seem like you have your head on your shoulders with respect to tech. That's a good thing. Who you need to partner with, then, is a salesman or marketing guru. This needs to be someone with business connections or the tenacity to pound the pavement until sales start rolling in. This must be a partnership, and not one entered into lightly. Think of it as a marriage: if you join to the wrong person, it will be painful for a very long time.

I'm a good programmer. I've built a lot of websites and tools across many different technologies, and I am currently in my 3rd year of PhD studies in CS. My first business failed because I had a "If I build it, they will come" mindset. Nobody came, and I lost $12,000. Another project of mine failed because, although the idea was ahead of its time, I did not have the business contacts in that field necessary to reach critical mass. A startup that I worked for also folded because they did not have a valid monetization strategy.

What I am trying to say is that the idea is a very small part of the equation. Execution, marketing, and networking are just as important as the technology, but you haven't mentioned those at all. A good idea will not get you where you want to go, just as tires will not move you across town. It is a part of the solution, and an important part, but there are other important parts, too.

My unsolicited advice to you is this: spend more time looking for business partners that you can trust with your future, both in terms of skill set, business acumen, and financial integrity. Then, together with them, develop the idea that you want to pursue. With the right team, you can be very successful. By yourself, you might as well try playing the lottery. In fact, the lottery will be quicker and will probably cost a lot less.

Why do you think you have to lose money to attempt to build a side project?

I built one in my spare time over about a month, with a specific niche market in mind, and my first customer ready to purchase. It was profitable, not counting my lost leisure time, from day 1. A few years in it's not made a ton of money, but it's still profitable every single month without fail, because even one customer will maintain that.

I have not touched a line of code in ~18 months.

"They didn't come" to my project, either. The niche needs non-adsense sales, and my partner failed me on that front. Still, I didn't spend a dime.

Most of the people here are likely to be techies capable of bringing the good, feasible ideas to light themselves

Unfortunately I think you've over-specified yourself out of a discussion here. What ideas do you have and why have you ruled them out?

"A better search engine than Amazon" isn't an idea, how would you do it. What technologies would you use? Amazon was built at a time when computing wasn't as powerful as it is now and iterated on and hacked on. If you started from scratch what would you do? Once you've done that how would you monetize it?

Same with the porn search. Where's the idea? You've given us the headlines but not the articles!

I don't want to come across as harsh, just give your discussion a bit of a bump -- and my good ideas are my ideas - I'm working on them already!

> We all have ideas but 90 % of them are fantasies or have near zero market potential.

Agreed. Who's going to judge which one is which? A random guy working on a top-whatever company, when even top investors get it wrong 8 out of 10 times? ...

I'd like international ACH/checking transfers to every country out there, mainly as a tool to pay international freelancers or similar self-employed people. I can say it's viable because I'd use it.

PayPal does this quite well, but they unfortunately mix this with accepting credit cards so they're subject to VISA and MasterCard's rules(hence all the cries of "PayPal shut us down and froze our accounts due to something triggering their chargeback risk alarm!").

Dwolla looks like what I want, but they're only in the US. Still, I'll probably use them to start with as an option.

> 2. Porn search engine

Sounds like a good idea. I wonder why isn't this a thing yet?

Edit: I googled "porn search" instead of using DDG and found out that is a thing. Looks like, there are tons of porn search engines. That means it's not enough just to create one anymore. Some unique advantage is needed, isn't it?

P.S.: My humble observation is on Reddit you get downvoted for "Good try Zuckerberg", "they'll steal my idea", and not accepting "idea is nothing, implementation is everything". Looks like that's not the case here on HN.

"porndude" for once seems to be rather big one. I used it as a starting point for an iptables script that re-routed access to porn websites through VPN ;-)

A ClearOS (or whatever other Linux/BSD gateway/firewall distro you like) add-on/plugin that blocks access to/from Tor. Basically a thing that takes the torproject's published exit node IP address list that updates every 30 minutes & plugs those addresses into IPTables- or something along those lines. Currently this functionality doesn't exist for firewall/gateway distros (AFAIK).

Because it is a mini bash script. Nobody aint gonna write polished software for a 3 line bash script.

About the porn thingy. Next to that there are already a lot of these and that monetizing porn sites really is a pain and very different from everything else. What makes you believe that there is a need for this?

"I work for one of the top 10 tech companies in Bay area"

Has been on HackerNews for 23 hours

Choose one.

In fairness, he didn't say which Bay.

Good try, Winklevoss twins :^)

Haha... your comment made me chuckle. I am not looking for your next gen. DNA mapping idea. It could be something as simple as a sales website idea that you always had but never had time to create one.