Ask HN: Building a side project that makes money. Where to start?

1. As others have covered, you need a market. Find something that interests you, or you won't stick with it. For me, I manage an events guide for local bands and pubs to compile their free-to-the-public gig listings. It's taken various forms over the last 15 years or so, from Mambo to Joomla to Wordpress to a Facebook page, and I'm finally getting around to rewriting it as a standalone product using Django, and it's only as part of this iteration that I'm monetising it is starting to look like a potential option.

2. You may also need an audience. You need people to use your product, and that might mean you need some kind of free tier to lure them in. In my case, an events guide which doesn't list all the events people want to see is useless to my audience, and if the audience don't use it it's useless to my potential clients. That means I have to provide the basic service for free - any monetised features are worthless without it.

3. For any skills you're lacking, learn them. If you outsource your front end work, you've got to pay somebody every time you want to change it and you can't reuse it anywhere. Once you know what you want to do, learn how to do it by actually doing it.

You're absolutely right that any money earned from your own pet project will be far more satisfying than your day job, but that's because it's that much harder to earn. If you start down the road with the specific intention of earning, that road will be paved with frustration. Get an idea, develop it into a prototype, get some feedback, and then you can start looking at outsourcing some of the more polished parts that are still outside your capabilities.

I made colormind.io - it makes about 200 a month. Here are some concrete steps you can follow:

1. market research: think about a field or niche you're interested in. Type some keywords into Google keyword planner to gauge search traffic, pick one with at least 10k hits per month. For me this was "color palette generator"

2. build: type the keyword into google and check out the competition. What kind of content are they serving? Could you do better? You want to make something genuinely good, novel or interesting so people will link to you. For me this was the "AI" angle. Key point: use the exact keywords to refer to your site, to prime the discussion when others talk about it.

3: promote: post on relevant subreddits/producthunt/hn. If you're lucky a major general-interest blog or news source picks it up, otherwise you'll have to put in some legwork and do some link building.

4: monetize: it usually takes 6 months or so for organic traffic to trickle in, though it could be sooner. Once you have traffic, you can start to monetize. This is the easy part - google ads/carbon are good options. Affiliate links are less consistent - it depends on your niche and what the affiliate is.

if you're not good with design just use a nice looking free template.

I would recommend speaking to people about their problems. You will discover something eventually. Once you've identified a problem, then it's time to design the solution. You might not necessarily need front end dev skills - there are all kinds of apps that let non-coders piece things together so that it's a functioning solution.

Check out https://bubble.is/ ↗. Validate your solution and then when you need additional horsepower, it might be worth hiring developers. I've a friend who builds software with offshore resources. They do work for big names such as Spotify but also startups as well so happy to connect him with you.

For inspiration on various ideas, check out http://indiehackers.com ↗ - a site primarily all about entrepreneurs bootstrapping side projects to profitability.

My suggestion is to make something you would find useful but that don't already abundantly exist (don't make a todo app or a calendar). This way you won't feel frustrated if nobody uses it but you. Keep it simple, keep only the core and polish it.

For ideas, I try to look into where I spend time during a typical day/week/month and see if I can find a way to simplify it or automate part of it. Then see if that's an issue other people have too by discussing with your friends, colleagues or making online searches on the topic.

Don't get hung up on your idea if it's not useful to you. Try another one and write down your ideas when they come to you so you can revisit them later. The best ideas are usually the ones that keep coming back.