Ask HN: How to come up with ideas for micro side projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to come up with ideas for micro side projects?

50 pointsitwontbelong35 comments

Hello friends,

I want to build something! But I have very limited time. So I was thinking if I could optimize for small, very practical ideas that I could pull off with the amount of time that I have.

Do you have any tips on how to come up with ideas for micro side projects?

Bonus if it would be possible to monetize it in any way like ads or micro payments for a very residual income.

Extra bonus if it is something simple that can improve peoples lives.

... Maybe I'm asking too much.

Thanks

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Start working on something, literally anything. In the course of working on it, you will encounter problems. Congratulations, you now have problems that you need solving which hopefully other people experience too and would pay for a solution. Now you build that solution and you sell it, abandoning your initial project.

This is what I do at least, it works well. It also encourages more B2B businesses than B2C. Recently I've looked into form handling for businesses, an email API that's good, an uptime monitor for my products, etc.

+1 this advice.

I was building another startup, and I stumbled across this problem of managing my images better.

And it ended up doing better than the initial product I was working on. Had I not built something in the first place, I wouldn't have known. I think it's a good example of a Micro-Side project

https://www.heyraviteja.com/post/portfolio/figmage/

Or the side project you work on won’t be successful but you can reuse pieces of it for other projects. Code doesn’t stop working just because a product didn’t materialize.

Here is my story, which may provide some inspiration.

My co-founder was searching for an apartment to purchase and found that all the tools he was using had weaknesses and none of them met his needs. We decided to create an aggregator for real estate offers. Initially, we intended to target users looking to buy an apartment, but we later pivoted to focus on real estate agencies and added features around this. After more than two years of part-time work on the project, we gave up as it was not sustainable for various reasons.

However, while working on that project, we had to develop a web scraping infrastructure to collect data reliably for our system. We realized that we could create a separate product based on this, which led to the development of Scraping Fish API for web scraping: https://scrapingfish.com. We understood the market and our potential users/customers well, as we were the users of the system before. It makes it easier to sell a product when you understand the market and your target audience.

You can read more about our journey on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish.

Pay close attention to anything in your life that is an inconvenience, pain in the neck, etc, and think about what the perfect automated solution would be. Then scale that back to a MVP.

Usually life is full of little pin prick pain points like this.

Ideas are everywhere but maybe difficult to spot the ones that can be monetized, especially if you want a micro project. If you don't really mind the monetary aspect and just want to build something, there's plenty of options. I'll give some personal examples.

1. A reddit post which showed IMDb ratings of all Simpsons episodes made me think, "what if there was a site that could do that for any TV show?". A weekend later https://theshowgrid.com was born. Building it was so much fun. I spent more time on the tooling necessary to make it a static site than the site itself.

2. I'm part of a small forum of maybe a few thousand users. There are some things a user can do there which takes some extra steps. So I built a couple of browser extensions that were well received. I only have a few hundred users but I know it matters a lot to all of them. And that makes me happy.

3. Few years ago I built a simple website for my hairstylist's charity. Not a technical challenge but it was a great way to build connections and to expand knowledge outside tech circle.

Really, there are plenty of opportunities. I'm sure you've many personal itches to scratch. That's a good starting point.

Become a collector of ideas. No matter how far-fetched or seemingly impossible - write that idea down as soon as it shows up.

As other commenters have pointed out, your own problems can be a great starting point. Also, look for issues people around you have. Write the problems down and try to find solutions for them.

Be inspired by other people's ideas. Add them to your list. There's a bunch of fascinating ideas in this thread already. Do some of them excite you? On the list they go!

Hopefully, you'll find that ideas tend to breed. Thinking about a given problem makes you think of related ones. Or an entirely different problem with the same structure.

Add to the list until something appears that you're passionate about. Or something you think might have a good shot at earning money. Then start looking into how you can build that something.

---

I have been collecting project ideas for years but only started working seriously on one of the larger ones last year.

My problem has been the opposite of yours: Choosing something to work on and sticking with it.

Partly to help myself focus, I recently made https://premature-documentation.com/ in the hope that other people might find a project to work on or share ideas for projects they don't have the time to work on themselves.

The idea is for the site to be community-driven, but I won't be able to work on functionality or look for contributors right now. So for the foreseeable future, it's going to be me offloading everything from my list of ideas until only the obviously bad ones are left ;)

Write a command line tool following the Unix tooling philosophy: have it do only one thing, but do it well.

You can get inspiration from here: https://github.com/topics/command-line

Tangent: where do I find folks like you? Is there a website where competent people donate their time to help on meaningful projects?

You can find competent people if you open your wallet

That's true. However, I am a grad student and I can't afford a wallet.

I really want to say that all the low hanging fruit has been picked, but in truth, new fruit pop up all the time, waiting to be discovered. New problems pop up, which are waiting to even be identified before solutions can be thought of. New technologies pop up, which are waiting to be connected to existing problems, either solving them for the first time, or replacing a previous solution.

To be honest, I don't know how many of these projects I've thought over in my head, only to find that they either require too much time, or have already been solved.

I think satvikpendem is right, start to work on literally anything, and try to notice problems you encounter along the way, maybe a neat little project hides there..

My suggestion for "literally anything" would be some low-effort creative project, like starting to take a picture every day, or write a sentence of prose, or listen to a song you've never heard before.. And do _anything_ with the output, either put it out in the world, or keep it to yourself.. Your project may come from trying to manage it all..

My current project is a backup solution that suits me, that's build on top of zfs, it's mostly bash scripts, it might never be public.

I think the best way to go about this is to think about what you do. No matter what it is, consider if maybe there's a better or easier way to do it. I've come up with a lot of great small projects to solve personal nuisances over the years. I've only implemented a fraction of them, for two reasons: Way more ideas than I know what to do with and ideas can easily snowball into a much larger project that becomes difficult to set aside time for.

It also helps to look at projects that already sort of address your issue but you think could be solved in a different way that you think suits your needs better. I've also written some small command line programs that fill some unfulfilled need yet aren't meant to be a complete solution, more of an additional pipeline for other useful CLI programs I use like z.

No idea about monetization though.

I usually just pick a very small problem that I have and start building around that. For example, right now I spent too much time reading HN/Reddit and not enough time studying for an exam coming up, so I'm thinking about making a chrome extension that prompts me to answer a random question from a bank every few minutes otherwise it'll lock me out of whatever I'm reading.

Picking a simple stack (e.g Browser Extensions are underrated imo) also helps with building something small and quick.

Someone who I get a lot of inspiration from is https://tinyprojects.dev/. I've been reading his blog for quite a while and it's definitely kicked my brain into gear with small projects.

Take note of things in your day-to-day which annoy you.

I became a product owner for a team running 3-week sprints, and kept finding myself being caught out in stakeholder meetings - being asked for prospective delivery dates relative to our sprint cycles. I have others on my team to organise ceremony dates and handle the Jira stuff etc, I just needed something to glance at on my phone within a few seconds.

I'm not a developer by trade so it's nothing fancy, but I made https://sprintcalendar.com and I use it most days at work now. I can't see how I'd monetize it, but it was fun to put together and solved a problem I had.

That's like the holy grail when you find something like this...

Currently trying to get deeper into Rust and struggle to come up with reasonable project ideas that are fun, challenging but also not so big that I cannot "finish" them in a reasonable time.

My advice is to simply start jotting down ideas. I do so in a todo app on my phone and I keep a Scanners Daybook for the detailed notes on those ideas.

Once I begin to think of ideas they cause other ideas.

My latest idea was to build a shell in Go, which isn’t a side hustle, but jotting it down (and also working on it) generated a lot of other ideas.

Here’s the shell I built in Go (which is effectively just a hello world app that runs on ssh connection and instructions on how to run it).

https://github.com/codazoda/goshell

Some ideas on my list…

- A feature flag API

- An embroidery file organizer

- Open source live web chat

- A video podcast platform

- Privacy preserving web comments

My granddad is going thru all of the confusion and worry that comes with dementia. I’ve had this idea to set up something I could run on an old raspberry pi plugged into the tv and have it just cycle thru recent photos from family. There’s some light web admin where family members can log in and add new photos, maybe with a little description that would appear on screen. Ye olde CRUD web app.

It’s a bit half baked, but there’s something!

A good way to start is to look around for things that people or companies are already using (some B2B software tool), and see if there are a ton of people complaining about it (maybe some bad feature, aggressive pricing model, customer support etc.). If so then you can start building an open-source version of it, since you already know what are the key features to build and add.

Start with figuring out what persisting problem in your daily life or in the lives of people you know you can solve. When I'm stuck, I try to remember what complaints came up a lot and try to build something around that idea. If it doesn't stem from issues relevant to me, I tend to forget about the projects, so it helps.

i email myself ideas i have to gmail, then i put them in my running notes.txt file, where i mark them as 'idea: do this stupid thing so you can...', so i can search for 'idea' and find them easily when i have some time and figure out if i had ever thought of something interesting, and then i either do it at some point or don't.

i have gone back and looked at them and somtimes picked one off.

i've run into several problems over the years, including overbuilding-which-leads-to-never-building, even tho this is the first thing i would advise everyone to never do. :-D

i feel like getting payments can be part of that, so my new new new strategy would be to build something interesting / that solves a pain / problem for someone, _then_ try to charge if it comes to that, but before that it's not worth trying to set up payments, etc. sounds obvious, but...

Am working on one such project right now.

It is a single small feature which I regularly used from some software that doesn’t work on modern hardware.

Getting my old laptop out became annoying enough I decided to recreate the single feature as an html page with some js.

Chances are many people have these minor annoyances that can be recreated or improved.

Find some small site or tool you usually use, identify the shitty parts you wanna get fixed, check if you qualify for the task (can you do it, can you afford it in terms of time and $), identify ways you can host it for free or ways you can monetize it, set a deadline, work on it.

make a self-help site with ads on it that shows people how to install ublock

Make a mobile app that uses speech recognition and provides a good voice interface for switching YouTube music. Use case: driving in the car and switching up the music

How to stop lmao. I have enough projects do you want some of mine?

I'm working on a project where I launch something every week this year. Here's my process:

* Create a notepad in your phone and throw any and all ideas in there whenever they come up

* Choose one to work on this weekend - whichever excites you the most

* When working on the project, be careful of scope creep. Accept your project will do one thing, and one thing only. Also accept your project will probably be crap - that's ok, you just need to something to start with so you can begin building on top of it next weekend

* Start with technology you're very comfortable with - whatever that may be. Then learn whatever else you need to learn as you work on the project

* Reuse code from past projects

* Force yourself to launch by the end of the weekend. This restraint will force you to be creative with your approach to building, and launching is always a great morale boost

Games are always fun to make and you can use whatever tech you have available to you. I make little games that run in the browser for my kids to play.

I love games. Is here anywhere where we can play yours? Thanks!

https://letter-press.netlify.app/

They are not impressive but my kids like them.

Accounting systems for non profits are hard to find. They have donors and donations not customers and sales.

Also non profits have too small of a budget for tools.

There's no shortage of work that needs doing.

Packaging is a never-ending supply of work that needs doing.

If you can design something that solves the problems of packaging.

Would freelance work from something like fiverr scratch your itch? (I dunno, I haven't done it)

I look for the needs of my current users and see if there is something else I can help with.

find things people complain about and think what would be the simplest possible solution (besides not complaining)

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