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Comment by tobltobs | Hacker News Reader

> how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side.

You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times.

> I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life.

Sounds like you have already build something. Brush those up, make them available for the public and for the start don't think about how you will make money from those. You will get users and feedback. Those might help you in building something which will earn money.

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> You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times.

You realize that that's how it felt like to most people at almost any point of time in the human history?

What? Nonsense.

Ask someone you know who doesn’t work in technology what they need. A teacher, a plumber, your doctor, your mechanic. I guarantee that someone will come up with something.

Us geeks think all of the problems have been solved because most of our problems have been solved. Meanwhile the rest of the world doesn’t know that we can actually help them because they don’t know to ask and we don’t think to.

Even in tech, find some speciality market that isn't well-served by programmers already. My day job is information security, and our tool sets are atrocious. We use them because it's all we've got, and the security field isn't well known for being a software engineering powerhouse.

I could list off a ton of programs I'd love to have, but are way (way way way) too niche to pop up on the radar of anyone who doesn't work in security.

What kind of software would be needed

A couple weeks ago I shipped a simple project that consisted of an Arduino logging some data to an SD card. Three of them actually.

Dataloggers are a dime a dozen, but yet someone still wanted to pay more than the price of buying three off the shelf units simply because what he wanted was slightly different from everything he could find.

The point is that it doesn't matter how many times something has been done; there's always something different you can do that a niche of customers need.

I've found a lot of amateur tinkerers will pay me to write arduino/esp8266 code for them.

The downside of this kind of project is that it can often be quite time-consuming, and often-times you wonder if failures are caused by the parts you can't see; the owners not soldering/wiring things properly.

I've had interactions where my "code was broken", which mysteriously got fixed without me making any changes. Throw in timezones into the mix, and you can waste a day looking for a bug that just isn't there.

My approach is to try to avoid the obvious "tinkerers" who are just messing around. I'll happily work with amateurs, but I have to believe that they are invested in getting something working and I also offer to buy the parts and provide them with a complete assembly for a fixed fee. The pickier I am about the project, the more likely it is to go smoothly.

But I far prefer working with actual businesses because they just want an end result and won't try to dicker with me by pointing out how high my prices are and how much less "this guy on Guru.com" can do it for.

The thing I truly love about the Arduino ecosystem is how fast it lets me put together those one-off projects. Things that would take weeks in "normal engineering" can be out the door in an evening. What I don't like about Arduino is that the focus on simplicity often comes with a huge cost in performance. Luckily, it's rarely been an issue.

> most of them already a few times.

This is the major point. The market is HUGE, and it's very possible still to build a better mousetrap and capture enough customers for a decent side income.

Assume your audience already knows the competition, and differentiate.

It might be sustainable, but only because you're not charging anything. Also, products don't have to be different to be successful. If something has a high price, it has not reached market saturation, so the same good would be fine there.

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