Ask HN: How to start a successful side business | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to start a successful side business

46 pointsgalazzah10 comments

I'm a business oriented Computer Science college student who's been trying to come up with an idea for a profitable side business for some time now. How do you find the right idea to build a business off of?

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Pick a niche market. Talk with 5 businesses in that niche market about their pain points. Discuss with them their painpoints, repeating tasks or reports. Then crystalize a problem that all of these businesses have in common. Find a freelancer that creates a quick&dirty prototype that solves the problem to some extend. Show them the prototype and have them subscribe to a 50-100$ plan. Fix all bugs in a reasonable timeframe. Now either automate more of their work, or find more people in that niche to buy your software.

Niche markets: Pick any existing popular SaaS that non techies use that have an API and some community (discussion board or forum) you can reach out to. Ecommerce: Shopify, bigcommerce, magento. Payments: stripe, wordpress, stripe, braintree. Accounting: xero, quickbooks.

- Do not code yourself, it requires great discipline. It's always more fun to code than to talk with customers. - Businesses are happy paying money even for a terrible product if it makes their lives easier. - People love to talk about their problems (aka how you can extract money from them). - There's multiple ways to start a business, this approach is just one of them. - Don't read too much blog posts and business books about online businesses. They are confusing you and holding you back. Business is a skill like programming, you learn more actually coding, than reading about how to code.

So basically cold call businesses in niche markets to find out what they would pay money for, solve that problem, and profit?

Basically, get a lot of domain knowledge about a market, understand your customers, etc. Build trust. Don't focus on profit initially.

Might seem like a silly question to a lot of people around here but, any tips for identifying niche markets to target?

Start with what your friends and family do for a living, especially if any of them work in logistics, manufacturing, product sales, etc.

One thing is just read all the standard advice out there from HN people, The Lean Startup etc. Also older stuff like The Mythical Man Month.

Not exactly sure what you mean by come up with an idea. I have dozens of ideas and come up with new ones all the time. If you're always in the back of your mind on the lookout for a business, and your mind is active, ideas will come to you.

Maybe you mean feasible ideas. I usually rank my ideas by how long v. 1 would take to make, and concentrate on the shorter ones. For example, I know Android, and wrote a stopwatch app in two weeks. It might be too easy to write, too competitive due to that ease etc. - but its just two weeks from my life. I've also written Android apps where v.1 took 2 1/2 months.

The main thing I'd say is think how long v. 1 will take. Something like one year would be too long.

"Successful" is so subjective. What metrics are you taking into consideration?

Find problems that businesses need solved, and put your skills to work coming up with a solution that will be valuable to customers.

Honestly, I think much of the problems with folks like us is that we are prone to "analysis paralysis". In other words, we think/research thing to death - and wait for circumstances to be just perfect, before we move on any of our ideas.

I'm not trying to downplay ideas and planning, but much of figuring out what to do comes with STARTING something, and seeing how it works. Then if/when something fails, you can iterate/pivot.

Here is some inspiration/good information and a service that sends you a SaaS idea per day:

http://StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com (Rob has went from drop shipping beach towels to selling his SaaS GetDrip for $XX million(just a guess) you can follow him along the way in the podcast.

https://nugget.one/ (email Justin at techzing about a student discount, this is more for SaaS probably not your best starting point, see Startups for the rest of us, stair step method in podcasts above. But the nuggets are interesting.)

http://techzinglive.com/ (Justin is on this podcast)

Your idea for you side business will most likely find you, when you build something scratching your own itch or you see an opportunity you can solve with technology.

Good luck.

There used to be Idea Sunday on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=idea%20sunday The general rule is: solve somebody's problem (and thus create value for that person). And it doesn't have to be a problem millions of people have. A friend focused on supply chain optimization (webapp) for dental factories (not sure that's the right word). Another build a mobile app for pharmacies. I tend to tell people to talk to business men/women of traditional (boring?) industries.

I just fell into it. An opportunity opened (to teach at a conference and be paid per head rather than per hour of my time) and I went for it. It changed how I think about making money.

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