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Comment by fm2606 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it.

I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow.

In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare.

Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on

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One of my products makes well over that amount, and it’s an identical clone of one of about 500 identical products in the same (large) niche.

If all you want is $1000/mo, you don’t necessarily have to solve a new problem, you can solve a problem that already has solutions (ideally doing it slightly better, but this isn’t required).

If your product is identical to the competitors, then you can carve out a small percentage of the market just be being the first solution the user tries, e.g via paid ads putting you at the top of the search.

Best of luck!

I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?”

Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.

So in future, build a landing page, start shipping it around and see if you can get some early potential customers interested.

Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it.

If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more.

This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based on feedback.

> start shipping it around

Can you elaborate on this?

Share it on social media, talk to potential customers about it, give people something to sign up to, in order to learn more.

Ok here is the playbook:

- Go here https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...

- Look at the list of products

- Copy one of them

- Do it a bit better (e.g. cheaper, faster, hosted in EU, targeted at some specific segment of users etc.)

- Launch asap (no longer than 3 months of coding)

- Reach out to potential users everywhere you can, until you get a few dollars of recurring revenue in

- Write blogs, and long form content, integrate with other libraries and systems

- Automate everything, pay for services that aren't core to your business (e.g. payments, backups, etc.)

- Do everything you can to help all your early users, keep improving the product every week

- Wait a few months/years, till it compounds up to 10-20k MRR

Thanks. I'll definitely take a look.

actually a pretty good playbook, would probably work

Are you suggesting to copy one of AWS services? This seems like fool's errand.

It is all about execution. There are people making 10k/month++ right now with apps to take notes or newsletter

What blows my mind is that people tolerate paying monthly for what is a static service.

A service routine monitor doesn't need to be updated every month to function, so why would anyone pay every month to use it?

Offer a cheaper solution and find out!

Servers cost money each month, as do the services they use.

"Tolerate" is an odd way to describe a totally voluntary transaction in a market with plenty of alternatives. The service is either worth the price or not for each person, regardless of the COGS.

If only plumbers knew the value of having a toilet inside your house.

You've got a backend as well, and support?

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