Ask HN: How do you come up with side project ideas in 2024?

I'll take an original approach, and I hope you'll like it.

First, to be fully transparent, I'm going to talk about my service, https://getfernand.com ↗ (A customer support service focused on being fast and stress-free). I prefer to share that first rather than lying to you about sneaky plugging my service.

Now, that being said, let's talk about ... Fernand. As you might have guessed, it's not a ground-breaking service. There are already hundreds of competitors out there doing the. Exact. Same. Thing.

So why did we go and build another one. To be honest? It's because of the market. It is:

1. Validated. 2. Big. 3. Complex 4. The big ones aren't getting praise right now.

That's why we decided to go that road. Granted, it requires a crazy amount of work, and the to-do pile doubles every time we remove an item, but still, it's a market so broad that you can't be stuck on the ideas.

But why does it relate to your question? Easy. Nowadays, it's nearly impossible to start something NEW, something that no one else is doing. Seriously, if you go and pitch a VC firm about your new project that you are alone on the market doing ("and that's why we can't evaluate the market for"), they'll think you haven't done your homework correctly. That's all. (and they'll be right.)

So it leaves you with doing something that already exists. Now, for this, you have a few options:

1. Going on a market where there are not many competitors. This can be interesting because you can easily become a leader on this market. But there might not be many competitors for a reason. Pouring your heart and soul onto something that will have a slow growth (if any) to a very limited market is ... well ..., it depends on if it's your heart that is driving. 2. Going against a proven market. This will be harder. Way harder. But you'll have a better chance of growing and getting at least a small fraction of the market. If you can get 0.5% of a billion $ market, it is still 5M$!

That was kind of the reflection we had for Fernand. I manage other services (ImprovMX.com - email forwarding, and PDFShift.io - HTML to PDF conversion API ... another shameless plug ... damn!), and they are both very critical. One hour of downtime feels like an eternity. So, we sat down with my partner and discussed a service that wouldn't be that critical. We explored different possibilities and decided to land on a Customer support service.

Of course, if you go against a market by providing the exact same product as everyone else, it will be even harder, if not impossible, to stand out. For us, we decided to focus solely on small (1-10) SaaS services with a sensitivity to stress and by offering a clutter-free and very fast product (wow, so much keywords).

To go back to my initial list of 4 points, they were the driving decisions on why to go against the Customer support market:

1. Validated: Because we know that the market is proven. It won't crash tomorrow, and it is only expected to grow over time. Not like NFTs :D 2. Big: So we can hope that if we only get a tiny drop of that market, it will be enough to sustain our lives. We aren't looking to become millionaires, just to be paid building stuff. 3. Complex, so the entry barrier is higher. A big market that you can enter by building something in two days means having a ton of newcomers frequently, which will include, at some point, people reaching out to you asking if you want to acquire them. If the entry-level is high, you'll have more chance to establish yourself for the long run (and in the Customer Support tool, it is; you need an inbox, a knowledge base, and a chat system, AT LEAST). 4. That one's a bonus. Intercom is frequently criticized because of its pricing. So, on top of our USP(s), we also decided that pricing should be simple and straightforward. (we were past users of Intercom, and it is so irritating to have a ton of options with the "upgrade to have this feature" button almost everywhere!). For GetFernand.com, you have all the features for everyone, and only those who can respond pay for their seat, that's all.

Sorry I got a little carried away, but =>

TDLR:

For me, if you want to build a project that will bring beer money (I love beer!), I'd focus on going against big markets and try to make a small dent in them. Find a unique selling point and try to swim between the giant, getting the crumbs and growing from there. You can enter an easy market, but know the competition at the low end (newcomers) will be harder.

Of course this is my point of view.

<3

My biggest piece of advice is work backwards from where you plan to share it. If you want people to care about what you make, it needs to be built for a certain type of person, and you need a way to reach that type of person. Ideally you can repeatedly reach that audience.

Otherwise, you're going to do all this work, and then you're going to think of where to share it, and at that point you'll probably wish you had thought of this key step in advance.

Stuff built for "everyone" will rarely work because "everyone" is too broad an audience and too hard to reach.

Similarly, while Hacker News is a good place to post a project, it's very easy to get lost in the sea of /new and get zero attention, which could set yourself up for disappointment if that's your only distribution channel. It's better to have a smaller channel you have a higher probabilty of reaching -> think a small Discord, a small subreddit that's easy to get on the front page of, a small Facebook group, a small old-school forum. If you're part of any community on X/Mastodon that can work but I wouldn't stress about it if you're not, as there's many alternatives.

Hopefully, these are all communities that you want to be a part of and are active in. A lot of self-promotion can be forgiven in communities if you're otherwise an active member who contributes in many non-promotional ways.

The repeatability is important because that lets you iterate. Even if you front-page Hacker News, that's great, but you'll get a ton of traffic for a few hours but then you go an improve things and want another pass of attention, you can't really front-page again soon.

Of course, the most important thing is to stay motivated and keep pushing. I personally get motivated by other people caring about my project, paying for my project, etc and you sound similar based on your question, so that's why I'm giving you tips on accomplishing that. But many other people get motivated just because it's a really interesting challenge or it solves a huge problem in their life. Know thyself and what motivates you and pick a project you won't quit.

I will also note that you seem to want two contradicting things. You want to improve your Rust and you want to make money. For a given project, I'd focus on one goal or the other. And if you want to make money, frontend development is often important, HN condescending attitudes towards frontend notwithstanding. However, if your goal is just beer money just a popular repo might get that with Github sponsors.

Finally, you said you discard ideas because they're too simple. That is the most backwards logic you stated. You should be discarding ideas that are too complicated. Simple is great. Simple is the dream. Simple is unfortunately almost never easy. But one illuminating exercise is go back to popular Github repos and go to their very first commit and you'll see very often they started absurdly simple. As an example, DHH wrote the Rails frameworks in a couple weeks and a thousand lines of code and that became the dominant web framework for a decade. If your project gets popular , the complexity will inevitably arrive, there's no need to start looking for it from the start.

I've been doing side projects for a bit, and they've been a combination of things I think are just cool and relate to hobbies I like, or solve some kind of problem I'm having, or are cool things I've seen other people talk about (either twitter or in person meets or something)

The one I've been working on for a while is solving PITA leetcode style interview prep. I just don't do well in prepping without some kind of mock environment. To reference from a previous comment I made:

" I'm building https://comp.lol ↗. It's AI powered mock coding interviews, FAANG style. Looking for alpha testers when I release, sign up if you wanna try it out or just wanna try some mock coding. If its slow to load, sorry, everything runs on free tiers right now. I really dislike doing leetcode prep, and I can't intuitively understand the solutions by just reading them. I've found the best way for me to learn is to seriously try the problem (timed, interview like conditions), and be able to 'discuss' with the interviewer without just jumping to reading the solution. Been using and building this as an experiment to try prepping in a manner I like.

It's not a replacement for real mock interviews - I think those are still the best, but they're expensive and time consuming. I'm hoping to get 80% of the benefit in an easier package.

I just put a waitlist in case anyone wants to try it out and give me feedback when I get it out

Gonna apologize in advance about the copywriting. Was more messing around for my own amusement, will probably change later"

Often the ideas come from some obstacle or problem that you've experienced.

E.g. during the COVID almost nothing worked and I was stuck at home curious if there is still anything happening around me? And I literally wanted to see on the map if there was anything in my neighborhood at all. But none of the existing solutions worked for me. So I decided to make my own. So I've created https://wiwo.world/map ↗. There you can find things that are happening nearby.

With me the problem is more with the consistency of the executions rather than the idea itself.

As I wrote in another comment I often abandon a project for the next one.

Honestly, I do thing the execution is much more difficult and important than the idea. For example in our above project we have tons of ideas what other features to include but we want to make it with the active feedback by the users and we have a huge struggle to find any early adopters, mainly because we have never searched for such before.

One other controversial but possible approach is just to ask AI for ideas.

Or maybe you can take a look at all the existing products and see how you can improve one of them in your own way.

Unfortunately however, as I said above, most of the time, people fail when it comes time for the execution.

I just hope that within 6 months to 1 year you'll have found and built something you really enjoy working on and learn from, even if unfinished. Keep going. Positive conviction and optimism. Have faith. I hope you don't think negatively about your ideas and potential because that won't help.

What do you find extremely satisfying working on in programming?

Do you write all the time? It works for me! I keep journalling my ideas in a markdown README.md file publicly on GitHub since 2013. While I was writing I felt inspired by an idea and actually felt I desired to try write some code to implement this idea.

I encourage you! You can write your thoughts down and do small achievable things repeatedly.

I recommend using replit to get an environment quick and ready for programming in. When I was a child I wanted to be an inventor because I liked the idea of creating things.

My interest is low level things such as JIT compilers, database internals and distributed systems.

see my profile for what I've done with this strategy and my programming side projects.