What are the most profitable small projects? | Hacker News Reader

What are the most profitable small projects?

13 pointskulikalov13 comments

I'm a freelancer and cloud computing consultant, I charge $200/hr. At this point I want to diversify my income, have some semi-passive income or more scalable incomes maybe. For the last 5 years I've tried to launch a few startups, I have no problems with persistency, but it seems I suck at finding PMF.

What else can I try? Something based on my expertise. I thought about:

- Courses about cloud computing. The target audience is small, yet the topic is lucrative, so, I guess I can price it significantly above average. Also, I have ~$10k worth of audio/video equipment. I have no audience on social networks, but I have a lot of cash to experiment with ads.

- Youtube (cloud computing). The target audience seem to be way too small to payoff the efforts.

- Podcasts. Freelance, maybe high-profit freelance specifically. Podcasting still looks like wild west, even though i'm listening to podcasts for 7 years. Not sure what is ROI here.

- Marketplace software? I heard about people making slack/telegram/discord bots, something else? No idea what is ROI.

Any better ideas?

If you suck at PMF, it's likely you won't do well with marketplace software either. My own strength is PMF, so feel free to contact me, but often it's quite complex.

If you're good enough to charge $200/hour, I'd say classes or even a book. A lot of people do classes, but they really have no idea what they're talking about. There's a direct correlation between my skills and my income, so I'm happy to spend some money on improving my own skills. You might even join one of those other course platforms like Pluralsight.

What is PMF?

Product-Market Fit. Market has a problem. Product tries to solve it. It's usually an iterative process, where you read feedback from failed sales and disinterested users to modify the product closer to where the market really is.

This is the simplest and most complete definition I've read. Thanks!

Thanks for scratching that itch. Google was not helpful in this case

If you think about the projects you work on as a consultant, is there a software/SaaS you wish you could be selling to your client to solve one of their problems with paying for?

Your point makes sense. But I find it difficult to figure out what SaaS I could offer, because:

1. I get new client maybe once or twice a year.

2. I solve very case-specific problems for my clients.

So, very few clients with very different goals.

Thanks for suggestion, I guess I didn't think about this hard enough. If I'm already in a very warm contact with people who is capable of spending thousands of dollars on software every month, they must be interested in some kind of SaaS.

your new clients aren't limited by your old clients. if you have a saas idea you think is good you should go for it. courses can be profitable, but vast majority aren't, it's a fairly crowded space. might work, idk, I'm not from this space. just seems like a hella lot of work and you could make more for less in your field.

Maybe combine 3 of your ideas: YouTube, online courses and podcasts are really all the same media: video recordings of educational content. If your expertise is cloud computing and freelancing then start with a video podcast on YT where you separate audio if people want that option only for commutes, etc. They all involve the same workflow I assume and you could use podcast + YT to build awareness about courses.

YT vids posted could talk about smaller problems in that space and get enough of them together and you might have a course outline where you can go deeper and offer chat support. Or look at others in the space and do similar but with a freelancer viewpoint.

I’m imagining you run into slightly different problems as a freelancer. For example, GKE updates for an employee might be a monthly task they know how to do but as a freelancer your view might be coming in and having 6mo-1yr of updates to apply because they don’t staff an engineer. Maybe the staff engineer warns app teams to change/fix things but when you come in there might be unpleasant surprises waiting because the company has to call in the company that worked on an app to make changes. I have no idea if this is the case, just spit-balling.

>- Youtube (cloud computing). The target audience seem to be way too small to payoff the efforts.

this is not true. just search for the topics your could make videos about and I bet the top results all have over 500k views. Also look at guys like NetworkChuck, he has 1.29M subscribers. Will your stuff reach that many people? Probably not, it all depends on how good you are at it but it proves the market is there for you to make a lot of money.

I’ve never really thought of YouTube as a profitable venture by any measure. More luck-based than anything if you want to actually make money. And the time and effort that goes into it…

SAAS is hot. Offering SAAS capabilities or building on on top of existing SAAS solution for SAAS folks.

Podcast is tough and very niche still to forecast any revenue.

Infoproducts have practically no marginal cost, no support obligation, and can be produced without any initial capital investment.

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