Ask HN: I want to create a side business, but not sure where to start? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I want to create a side business, but not sure where to start?

1 pointyupstunned3 comments

I work for a large tech company. Most of my career experience has been in data, analytics and doing data integration and migration work. I have electronics engineering degree. I know backend/big data processing stuff pretty well,but I have no idea of doing frontend development. There are so many options that I don't know where to start.

Anyway, my intention is to create business and not the website. Even if it is selling physical products or software, I am okay with it.

Can you advise me where should I start? What type of software sells best?

As I don't know frontend development, should I spend time learning FE development or should I hire contractors for the development ?

Any advise will be helpful.

The problem is not the product.

The often insurmountable problem is how to get to your potential customers. For example, selling an iOS app or a book on iBooks is a dead end for most folks. There is just no ready way to get folks attention. The usual method is some social media scheme. Establishing a content marketing scheme or some other kind of social media scheme is the hardest part. It makes getting a product seem easy.

I'm not saying don't do it. DO do it, but plan on spending a huge amount of effort developing a marketing scheme. Start thinking about that from the very beginning. In fact, an insight into a workable scheme might be the starting point for choosing a product that would fit the scheme.

Good luck!

Find a partner that can do the front end work. That way you can work together to get to a minimal first version quickly. The longer it takes to get from starting to an actual first version you can sell, the more likely you will run out of steam and give up. Then work together to come up with a simple idea that can be coded within just a few months of spare time.

No one can tell you what to build because if we knew of a simple but great idea then we would do it ourselves!

Just use Bootstrap :)

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