Ask HN: How to come up with monetizable side project ideas?
While I agree with some of the tactics here (make a twist on similar ideas, contact businesses, buy a business, brush up an existing product you built)<p>I&#x27;m going to suggest an alternative method that has worked for me.<p>Start with the money.<p>If you want monetization to be guaranteed you need to prioritize that first.<p>Take this method and rinse&#x2F;repeat for you and your skills.<p>1) How much do you really want to make from this a month, what would make you happy?<p>Let&#x27;s say you decide $1k a month would make it worth it after time, expenses and payment processing fees.<p>2) You then decide how many customers you really want to have to find and how much support email you want to answer.<p>Usually developers pick prices like $6 and wonder why no-one buys. This low price screams a lack of confidence in the product. That you aren&#x27;t taking it seriously. That you may not be around in 8 weeks.<p>Starting without monetization in mind or equally, pricing low is the death of a product because for someone who dislikes marketing you just set yourself a huge marketing mountain to climb.<p>At $6 each, finding and selling to 150+ customers - when you don&#x27;t even have one yet is a huge trek to your $1k happy place.<p>Let&#x27;s say you feel more confident about finding and serving 10 customers really well. That seems achievable, right?<p>So with just 10 customers we&#x27;re looking at a $100 a month product, right?<p>Whoa, you&#x27;re thinking you could never build something that&#x27;s worth that much.<p>Maybe you&#x27;re worried it&#x27;s enterprise level costs now and that&#x27;s not the type of product you want to build.<p>Don&#x27;t worry, a $100 product can be really simple.<p>Often developers think that a big cost means solving a big problem and that a big problem needs a big solution. Not true at all.<p>A big problem can be solved with a small elegant solution.<p>3) Now we know how much we want to make and how many customers we need and how much we are going to sell it for.<p>We now need to find the problem we are going to solve.<p>So how big of a problem needs a $100 per month solution?<p>Not very big at all really.<p>Let&#x27;s say a business owners time is super-conservatively worth $50-$100 an hour.<p>So to add value, we are looking at saving someone between 2-4 hours a month on a task they normally have to do manually. That&#x27;s not too bad!<p>Or maybe you want to help them reduce their business costs by $200-$400. Also, very possible. Now we have the value proposition.<p>We know what kind of problem we are looking for, so value will be clear for the customer.<p>4) Now we decide _who_ this is going to be for.<p>Don&#x27;t pick people the same as you. They have the same skills and can solve the same kinds of problems that you can.<p>Pick a group of people :-<p>- That are easily identifiable by what they call themselves on social media (blogger, podcaster, videographer, designer, public speaker etc)<p>- Make sure they are a group you like interacting with, that you have some experience of working with already in some way (please pick a group you like and care about)<p>- Make sure they are the decision maker in their own business (don&#x27;t pick employees of big corps)<p>- What tech skills have you worked with that overlaps with this customer group?<p>Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;ve worked on a few video platforms in the past so you know that space well, so you choose to help YouTubers.<p>5) What is the issue that we are solving?<p>Ok, so now we&#x27;re helping YouTubers to either save 2-4+ hours a month or reduce costs by $200+ - for your $100 MRR product.<p>This is where we breakdown what it takes to run their business.<p>What stops them being more profitable?<p>What tasks do they do everyday?<p>What can be automated?<p>What do they hate doing in their business?<p>If you know this space even a little, you will have answers here.<p>Maybe video storage is a huge expense.<p>Perhaps running their community takes up too much time so they can&#x27;t scale.<p>Is just publishing a video end to end super time consuming? Look at why.<p>If you don&#x27;t know what matters to them, ask. Make a hypothesis and see if it&#x27;s true.<p>In just a couple of DM&#x27;s you might find that they spend a whole day a week on something repetitive. Or are spending money on something that you can optimize. Write a few possibilities down.<p>6) Make an offer<p>In just a day or two you can go from no idea, to identifying a significant pain point for a group of people that&#x27;s easy to reach.<p>Now you consider a couple of small technical solutions for the problems you&#x27;ve found.<p>You go back to a couple of your ideal customers and make them a proposition.<p>Something like - &quot;You said you spent X hours on this particular problem. If I built something to solve that, this week, would that be worth $100 to you?&quot;<p>If it&#x27;s a huge pain point they will bite your hand off. If you get weak responses - no worry, you&#x27;ve not built any code yet. You can use the conversation to get to a deal.<p>They might say it&#x27;s worth less so you find out what features would be needed to make it worth the $100.<p>Maybe they suggest a different problem that is more urgent for them.<p>After a few conversations you should have at least a couple of paying customers and a clear solution.<p>8) Building<p>Now you know exactly what you need to build and have customers waiting. There is no excuse but to launch. This will help you focus on the truly essential code.<p>As you build, reach out to a few more potential customers. (we made sure they were easy to find earlier) Ask them if they have the same problem. Show them what you have.<p>Go through a few cycles of building and feedback. Make sure people are paying you what you set out in the beginning - or close to it.<p>Ask your starting customers for referrals. You&#x27;ll reach your 10 customers with zero marketing spend.<p>You then have all of the elements needed to scale further if you wish!<p>Remember that code comes last in this method for a reason. Only build when you have paying customers.