Ask HN: How do I come up with monetizable SaaS side project ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I come up with monetizable SaaS side project ideas?

19 pointsthe_parzival27 comments

Hello everyone, I'm a software developer with an year under my belt. I have been doing some freelance work like developing websites and making react native apps for small businesses owned by my friends. I do love the gigs, but I want to build a Saas that will generate some passive income. I have a couple of ideas but they can only be monetised through ads which is a big no for me. Can you help me find some ideas or some inspiration for a good side project? Thanks in advance.

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Build something around GPT-3. It's still nascent. Only a handful are profitable.

The top one is making $100k MRR in just 7 months → https://twitter.com/deadcoder0904/status/1398141109075730436...

One sold for ~$1m when it had $20k MRR in 8 months of launch → https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1377095814963589125?lang...

Another smaller one sold for $4k with $100 MRR → https://twitter.com/heyyfernanda/status/1398679798281605120?...

There are many others getting funded because of GPT-3 → https://twitter.com/kearonis/status/1378832191413702663?lang...

So I'd suggest building it around GPT-3 as it's just a bunch of API calls. Make it profitable & sell it if it's a life-changing amount. The hype around GPT-3 is at an all-time high so big exits should be easy.

And if you want ideas, just copy one of the popular apps & offer it with a discount or make it 10x better → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opkHJLVAM4A

Read the Paul Graham essay on ideas → http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

You need to solve a real problem so you get paid by people. I have been at it for ~4 years with nothing to show for it so my suggestion is to fail fast.

I have hopefully figured out now how to make a SaaS successful so I should be good for now but you don't waste time. Start now. Fail fast. Use SaaS templates like Bedrock & Style it using Tailwind UI so you can focus on the core logic.

Diving into GPT-3 right now, but they are on beta now, Applied for the waitlist. Meanwhile Im digging into their docs. Thanks for the advice

No problem. It's the best thing you can do to get profitable ASAP but remember to make something useful. Just sticking GPT-3 to anything won't work either. It needs to be something meaningful.

How do you get customers? Also how much do you spend on advertising to get the customers?

That's the hard part & the most tricky as well. As when the product you are making is so simple to make, then marketing is the only differentiation. On a related note, read this blog post → https://www.allencheng.com/starting-a-business-around-gpt-3-...

You need to make something that hasn't been done before so you'll have interest from people as GPT-3 is hyped up now. Spend less than the users will pay you. At first, you need to concentrate on getting customers. Most people use AppSumo lifetime deals but I think they're only good for funding your startup initially without VC money.

Otherwise you can go the VC route & get funded if your idea has legs.

Distribution/marketing is the hardest part in GPT-3 based biz but if you do it right, you'll print millions for sure.

You can even use https://ideasai.net/ to get ideas on your email!

Frankly, those idea bots are useless. You have to spend so much time on them to see the good ideas vs the bad ones.

Even some people who manually tell others ideas are useless as they don't say anything about execution plus they haven't spent a reasonable amount of time on thinking how it could all go wrong. They just spend 5 mins thinking & put it in their idea list.

How does one use GPT-3?

use the openai.com api?

Yes. Apply for access & if they feel generous, they'll give it to you :)

My personal opinion: for any project in which you’re the sole resource (engineer, product manager, subject matter expert, UX, QA, etc. etc.), if you want to be remotely successful, you must pick something that you want and will personally use.

If not, you simply won’t have the insight needed to design and build a useful product. Also without meaningful use, you’ll be blind to the product’s shortcomings.

To have the motivation needed to power through the tough times by yourself, e.g. when you’re really tired of working on it or have other competing obligations it should really be something that you’re personally passionate about.

If you build a product based on your assumptions of what other people want without the resources to test these assumptions, you run the risk of making something that isn’t useful to anyone.

I think this is where you start. Something that interests you, something you have knowledge around, something you will actually find useful yourself in your life or career.

Second, and more challenging, is getting traffic to it. The best product with not traffic is worthless.

Over the longterm, content and SEO are one channel. This takes time and is hard work. But it can be outsourced some.

Be involved in communities and forums around it.

Buy advertising.

More than anything, build and product content. If something is working, double down on it.

Thank you for the advice. The issue that I'm facing as an engineer is , everything I want to use has already been built, maybe I can come upon with improved versions of them.

It takes some time to come across the right idea. But it could be something you need that has already been built. Even though it's already in the wild, there might be demand for a new SaaS built for a specific framework or group of developers. Just because someone has already built something similar doesn't mean there is room for one more SaaS. I will say it seems like the majority of the success stories I come across are tools built for developers. So I would focus your attempts at developers. If you can create something to save them time or money, some of them will be willing to pay for it.

Making a Saas for developers is challenging, I will try to come up with some ideas to do the same. Thanks for the advice :)

If look at all the products you like that are already out there, probably few are first of their kind. E.g. React was proceeded (and followed) by numerous JavaScript frameworks. It’s totally fine (perhaps preferable) to improve on an existing idea — build a better mouse trap.

What products annoy you? That could be an indication a product isn’t really fulfilling your needs.

Are there any software products/services you want that are too complicated and expensive? Maybe build something easier, cheaper, and more niche.

If you’re still at a total loss, you might consider partnering with an expert in some area that has a problem you can solve.

1) do the proper research, there are plenty of articles talking about saas side project ideas, like this one https://www.blocshop.io/blog/15-saas-ideas/

2) check producthunt monthly winners, those are the apps that won during the voting https://www.producthunt.com/time-travel/2021/5

There's plenty of profitable SaaS listed on indiehackers.com , you can take inspiration from there

Thanks, I will check it out.

Find something people are already paying for, then sell a better or cheaper alternative.

have a look at my side project https://ideasfilter.com/

Wonderful project! The kind of filter you use is very smart. Thanks for sharing, Im definitely going to try and use it to find some good ideas. Also, Im curious, are you scraping data from App Store, etc or are you retrieving it real time through their apis ?

sorry i missed you for 12 hours, i am scraping the data from all of the platforms. Will add some more later, now i am working on some functionality to add custom ideas/apps, so people can share their idea and maybe also find people to work with.

Is there a certain time interval at which you scrape for data? for example - get data every x seconds. What is the 'x' here?

The pause is 24 hours. Once running it wont stop till there are urls with some pattern to crawl, there is also a limit to stop when enough pages didnt have an app

That's neat. Great project

thx :)

but i guess its not high quality enough.

Looks great to me. Why do you think it is not of high quality?

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