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Comment by newbie578 | Hacker News Reader

I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on?

Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?

For side projects intended to generate income, base it on market research.

- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.

- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.

- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.

A great way to find these niches is through the "free tools" section of large websites. This means it's a niche they're using for lead gen and seo purposes. eg: https://www.shopify.com/tools https://www.wordstream.com/wordstream-graders https://www.hubspot.com/resources/tool

> If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.

Just wanted to note that I make >50k/month, and this is the opposite of the approach that I've taken for about half my projects. I look for niches that I think will grow a lot, but which have no competition at the moment because the niche is so small. I build the site, SEO-optimise it, and then just leave it. I do this for lots of little niches that I think will grow, and about 1 in 5 take off. Some of my biggest sites didn't take off for years.

> No moat.

For my strategy building a moat is critical because I have way too many projects to keep on top of them and fight off competition that have a 1% better feature-set. The product should ideally get more useful "automatically" as it grows (e.g. user-contributed content, or something like that).

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My general advice: Learn basics of SEO, look around at what people want, build niche tools/things to help them get what they want. Keep repeating that and you'll eventually hit upon an idea that gets really big. Keep it simple (and cheap!) - a bunch of my projects that serve thousands of users per day run on Glitch and Replit (yes, really). Try to stick to project ideas that don't require much ongoing maintenance. There are likely many other good strategies - this is just my approach.

I’ve put together lists of ideas before, here’s a few ways I’ve done it:

1. Any idea that comes in your head, jot down in a card or list. This is just to get in the habit.

You may sometimes write a full page about the idea, sometimes it’s a sentence.

2. Quick triage, is this for “fame” (it’s just a small, time bound, scoped, fun project with no explicit objective or plan to earn money), or “fortune” (you’d only want it to be a business, prepared for months and years of work), both are fine

3. For “fame” tasks, pick ones that scratch an itch where you want to learn something or solve a problem (simple website, VS Code plug-in, OSS repo on GitHub, a tool/script you wrote and use locally you want to offer to others as a website, etc) something that’s time bound and has a very simple and complete scope.

4. For “fortune” tasks, decide which ones you feel are interesting, you have knowledge about the problem personally, you see revenue generation possibility, you can do it on your own or with minimal resources to start, you know it’s going to take years, but you’ve got something encouraging/progress to show yourself within 1-2 months

That’s how I think about ideas lately.

Would you consider projects that solve your own problems or that are for "personal aesthetic fulfillment" (i.e. you think it's cool, regardless of what others would think) as a separate category?

I've started a handful of side projects over the years, usually trying to fill a niche for small businesses, but none really took off because I grew uninterested. Once I started a project that was a) related to a hobby I already had and b) something I actually needed to use in real life, building it became a hobby in itself, I looked forward to working on it every night before bed, and eventually shipped a real product.

Work on whatever you're interested in or motivated to do.

It doesn't matter if one idea could be the next big thing if you aren't motivated to complete it and make it well. You'll execute better on the ideas you are interested in.

One aspect that I see recurring in successful side-project stories is that someone pairs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge. So you could do an inventory of what domain-specific knowledge you do have, and think about projects that would leverage that.

'airs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge' - and a route to monetise it.

If your goal is to generate money, an analytical approach (like a spreadsheet) makes sense.

I choose my side projects more emotionally; generally based on things I'm excited about, think will be fun to make, or involve things I'm curious to learn. Happy to share more if interested.

Make a side project that helps you determine the best way to choose which side project to work on.

Once you figured that out, make a side project, using the method you discovered, that helps you choose which side project to work on.

Then start working on that side project.

It's likely going to be a long road to profitability so pick something you're going to stay interested in whether it makes money or not.

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