What are the money making ideas that you have that most people who fit the HN demographic could likely start and make some money doing?
Passive income businesses or businesses where an average 16 year old can put in $1 and get $1.25 out are liable to get 'disrupted' by someone who is willing to put in $1 to $1.15 out or someone savvy who can put in $0.90 to get $1.25 out. Terrible market and it's exactly why you see them on YouTube selling courses on how to do it or even just saying their entire business plan because it's that brain-dead.
They are just bad businesses because they have no defensibility or IP generated. Yes, you don't have to work to earn necessarily but you are still hitched quite heavily to being hands-on.
My opinion is a good "boring" business is something that passes unremarkably at Thanksgiving and will never be on magazine covers, also good competition to prove the market is strong enough to have another entrant
If you can tell someone what the business is and they go "So anyway"... fantastic business. You don't want any venture-backed companies whose business plan starts and ends at a snow shovel and a pile of money. You will lose unless your plan is the same and you either have a bigger pile of money or your competitor is much worse. The ideal space is likely an established market with sleepy / stagnant competitors so you can carve off a few percent by addressing what the market is not and having a few million+ a year in revenue.
That is exactly like what I was talking about.
There’s like… two? They’re both garbage from my experience both as a frequent flyer and as someone who’s hosted one of them professionally.
Some ideas:
* Try to target niche non-technical industries where you know people who can validate, ask where they use spreadsheets.
* Wait for a company to be acquired and build a replacement. Acquirers usually abandon or ruin the product.
* Similar to above, find a service that was once good but has since pivoted the product to focus on the top-of-market whales. Things like gating access behind length sales processes and complicating the product to meet those requirements. Usually at this point existing SMB customers see billing hikes, can't get the time of day and start looking for alternatives. Build a simpler, self-service, down market competitor.
- Google analytics alternatives, like Fathom, Plausible, Simple Analytics, Umami.
- Uptime monitoring services
- Logging, server-side logging, but these seem to be larger companies now like NewRelic, DataDog, Pagerduty
- Niche-specific file hosting, like UploadThing for Next.js, essentially a super simple way to host/upload assets for your Next.js project that removes some of the annoyances when dealing with uploading.
- For this one, I think startup costs might be high but I feel like being a domain registrar is a boring business that could have long term passive possibilities.
- For a web dev HN user, I think one of the more "boring" ideas is to have a web dev agency that focuses on an offline business whose owners are not tech savvy or care not to be. I'm in Portland, OR and I've noticed a few web dev agencies being the main ones creating basic/static websites for clients ranging from plumbing business, landscaping, and other home related repairs. Or for family run business that just care about a simple online presences (hours, contact info, some basic details about their business).
That is a very good idea, the problem I find with that is that is a FB, Twitter and/or IG page are actually going to drive more business than a website as for as word of mouth and referrals, which is where the real growth is. So then if you are to continue with them, you are getting into social media management and higher fees, which they didn't want to begin with.
The website does help with Google searches and is a general must have box to tick off.
I have been experimenting with a website that might work for this but convincing people to sign up for it has been a wall to climb.
> What you will pay to ICANN:
> US$3,500 application fee, which is non-refundable regardless of whether the application is approved, denied, or withdrawn. Following an initial review of completed application materials, ICANN will contact applicant with instructions on how to submit payment.
> US$4,000 yearly accreditation fee due upon approval and each year thereafter.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/financials-55-2012-02-...
They also require you to prove that you can immediately obtain up to $70,000 under extreme circumstances, although exceptions are sometimes granted if you're a special case or particularly well-off.
It's an annoying business to be in I'm sure, since you're dealing with lots of small clients directly, and there's data-entry stuff. The way to go is probably you focus on sales and automation and farm out the data-entry to less skilled labor? I think the premise that you're a real local human being who can be reached for support, and you can save them from lock-in by zipping up a static site for their nephew to run could be compelling for some small-business-owners. Hopefully you can stay competitive with the nephew since you amortize all the administration stuff over a bunch of tiny, low-traffic pages.
I don't do any SEO/Ads, although one of the noteable links came from paying a outreach company to reach out to reporters and one wrote an article https://www.lifehacker.jp/article/lht_pdf-to/, although that was many iterations ago. Just been focusing on improving the functions and design since that initial launch phase back in 2019
edit: Oh! You're the guy that runs Yout
It doesn't seem like his endeavors require a TON of smarts beyond knowing how to sharpen blades and run the mill. But the human interaction aspects of running the business seem to be why he succeeds at it. He's prompt, thorough, upfront, on time, and a VERY hard worker. Lots of these aspects of running a boring business seem to be done very poorly in general, often because the boring business owner hires inexpensive staff, so set yourself apart from the rest by being really good at them if you start a boring business.
Could they use a free one? Sure. But most companies won't think twice about paying $100/mo for something. And you don't need _every_ company to pay you $100/mo, just 10, 15, 20 of them. And there are hundreds of thousands of companies out there.
The other thing is that there aren't a ton of uptime monitors out there because they don't make money; quite the opposite, there are a ton of uptime monitors out there because they create value and people are willing to pay for it!
To put it a slightly different way, there's a reason there are a million pizza restaurants and burger joints. It's not a zero-sum game! If there are five pizza restaurants, then there's likely room in the market for a sixth. Similarly, if there are 99 uptime monitor companies, there's room for a 100th!
If you find an area where there are _no_ competitors, that should actually be a red flag: why aren't there any? what's wrong with the business? is it because you're a genius and thought of something nobody else has thought of (let's face it, you may be a genius, but this is very unlikely), or is it because there isn't any money to be made (ding ding, we have a winner)?
Honestly, the best way to think of business ideas is to look at businesses that you already like, then just do what they do. Yeah, you're competing against an established player, but markets are rarely 100% dominated by your competitor. There's almost always room to squeeze out a lifestyle business. Plus, they've already done the R&D and validated the market! Win/win, honestly.
i am not sure about the pizza comparison because that's a question of capacity and location too. in any given location there is only a few and maybe there is room for a sixth but not for many more.
for a monitoring service the question is: what drives the diversity instead of everyone using the same one service?
why would i trust a new service instead of one others have recommended?
like email: there are thousands of email providers, but only a handful huge ones like gmail. is that different, or is it the same with monitoring services?
i guess my question is: how would i break into the market and find my first customers?
It's the Field of Dreams model. Build it, and they will come. Do some basic marketing. Worst case scenario, you built an uptime monitor for yourself!
I'm not sure diversity has to exist, honestly. If I'll pay one service $10/mo for uptime monitoring, and you have an identical uptime monitoring service for $10/mo, then it's just a flip of a coin which one I'll go with, right? There's no differentiating factor other than randomness. So go for it. Build it. Put it out there. You'll get _someone_. And over time, you can iterate based on the needs of the demographics that have chosen you. Maybe the people gravitating towards your stuff are more interested in cron jobs than websites, or maybe they're monitoring competitors rather than themselves, or maybe they're keeping tabs on government websites. Who knows?
You don't have to have all the answers right now. Build something and see what happens, then iterate from there.
how did you grow your users/customers?
for one it shows that you did have a differentiating value proposition, and also it doesn't look like the low effort project that others suggest would be possible.
can you share some milestones? how long did it take to get to 100$ 1k$ 2k$ monthly revenue?
I stopped sharing financial information publicly - but it's taken 3 years to look like it'll reach my salary.
You'll find things like website development, a need for lightweight CRM, regulatory needs, accounting, etc.
You should price 10% of the savings. So if you save a company $100k/yr, you should charge $10k/yr.
You'll get a benefit, they'll get a benefit, and you can prove that your product is worthwhile to other companies.
I have to admit I'm also unsure what GP means. :D
Much of it is through integrations not code. If I wanted, I could just cut out the custom integrations and just rely on plug-n-play / third party integrations.
It's an honest living. But I am uninspired by it, so am pivoting.
Otherwise, making services and seeing what sticks. There are millions of these that go unnoticed but are still going by on API fees. Or they just go nowhere :P
I read this as "pest control", and literally thought about living bugs. Bed Bugs in particular c/would be a multimillion dollar business in the US, I believe.
In general, to the OP I'd recommend finding a nuisance. The bigger the nuisance, and the more people affected, the larger potential.
Are you just asking for easy, low-tech (or lower/simpler tech) biz ideas or what?
Laundromat etc have higher value multiplier because they’re passive. Something like a large plumbing or trade business is great because you can have someone manage it but lower multiple.
Real estate can be good but typically hard to do better than 10% cash on cash return. Vs a business could be 100% on cash return. But obviously more risk and active management needed, and the real estate is more likely to appreciate. All about risk vs reward
Use your technical skills to automate 80% of the job, then hire the last 20%
Assets can be anything : an online tool, saas, an ebook, graphics, icons, stocks etc.
So, create or acquire digital assets.