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Ask HN:Small ideas
55 points by europa on July 16, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments
I can make an initial invetsment of 5000 and work/code 6 hrs weekdays and 8 hrs weekends still keeping my day job. I am ready to do that for the next 1 year.

Can I build something whithin that 1 year which starts giving me $1000 profit every month ?

I can code decently in java , Python and capable of build/configure Linux servers for my environments.

Any small ideas to hit the $1000 per month profits are welcome.



The biggest advice I can give you is to forget the consumer market and create a B2B product. You only need 20 customers paying $50 a month to get $1000 a month revenue and be able to easily get a 20-50k exit. If you figure out a way to save a business $50 a month, or 1 developer man-hour a month, hitting that revenue target will be trivial.

I have done this numerous times with tools I had initially built for myself to automate a repetitive marketing task which I then spun out into subscription services and flipped for a 5 figure sum.


That's inspiring. What sites were they?


They were tools to make marketing and SEO easier. Think keyword research, ad submission, etc/


I agree, I have a couple of my own services like this.

How long did it take you to hit acquisition level, how did you find the acquirer?


Basically the goal was to scale revenue rapidly and show solid growth month over month. Usually it takes about 6-9 months to demonstrate that degree of traction. Once I have it running for that long, I just post the site on Flippa- they love subscription sites with steady revenue there and will pay 12-24x monthly revenue for a site with steady and growing income, especially if it's unique and has custom code.


Sounds interesting but creating a product takes a lot more time than just writing the code. I'd be interested in hearing how much time you put into creating a product that provided you with a 20k to 50k exit. (Code and marketing time)

It seems as though working 15 hours a week for 6 months to develop a product that gives you a 20k exit would end up paying you $55/hour. Not a great return on your time in my opinion. But might still be worth doing at least once for the experience you'd gain in launching a successful product.


I would consider $55 an hour a pretty good wage- that's beyond ramen profitable. You also forgot to add the $1000-$2000 a month in subscriptions you receive before selling.

Also, development time is a sunk cost, because I had already built the tool for my own use. The only additional dev time is tacking on PayPal subscriptions and prettying up the interface, maybe 15-20 hours total. As for marketing, that's my area of expertise, so I don't mind. Usually just reaching out through my network of fellow marketers in enough to build a few initial users and start getting traction.


Look for a successful app you can copy. Then copy it.

I'm expecting downvotes for this comment, but it is the best advice I can give. You will learn tons in the process and the end app will likely be tailored in your vision. Something along the lines of this (jump to 4:43) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgy4PcSpUkI


Append #t=4m43s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgy4PcSpUkI#t=4m43s


Yes, you can build something in a year that brings in $1,000 a month. BUT. Unless it's a problem that you, yourself, are having, I'm skeptical that you'll have the energy to see it through. Put another way: What annoyances do you have about your life? Where is the internet falling down on the job? Build that.


Is Patrick McKenzie (patio11) an avid bingo player that lives and breathes bingo?

No. It sounds like[1] he sort of enjoyed it, and a friend needed help making bingo cards. But he saw it as a good market opportunity, so he went with it.

In Mike Rowe's TED talk[2], he referenced a similar idea. He talked about a pig farmer who grew his small farm to being worth >$60M (he turned down a $60M offer) by getting scraps from restaurants and feeding them to the pigs, which I guess helped them grow faster and/or cut down on their food costs. He said that he asked the guy if he was passionate about his work, and the guy laughed.

Passion's great and all, and it does make things easier, but if you're reasonably disciplined and just out to make money, there's a lot of very boring markets (like bingo cards) that are ripe for disruption.

[1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/

[2]: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...


I agree up to a point. There's more to think about here than just finding the right market -- though that's a must.

The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end. So if you're taking on a project that's going to be in development for several months before you can even charge a dime -- finding something to get excited about is huge.

If it's just something you're going to build in a couple of weeks then that passion can totally be lacking there because marketing is going to be much larger part of the effort (it typically is but typically not to this extent).

In any case, I highly recommend sticking with something you can launch very soon. Probably no more than 3 months. I went 6 months and it was tough. It's an exhausting effort so take advantage of that motivational boost that launching gives you.


>"The problem is that doing this while working full time is freaking hard. Doing an entire year of development after hours is just brutal. The longer the time to launch the more likely you are to not see it through to the end."

I agree. Working that hard is difficult to keep up. 6 hours a weekday and 8 hours a weekend is 38 hours additional work a week...

I am currently working on an open source browser game as a hobby project, and am discovering that it is much more work to get it right than I thought. But I decided in the beginning that it should be live after the first week or so and now I publish the current alpha every other week. Sometimes, this requires more refactoring, but I think this is balanced by the fact that the game is already in a state where it is not a closet project.

If you make a commercial product, be sure to have potential customers and a marketing plan before you sink a whole year of work into it. A customer of ours spent half a million for a _good_ piece of software and now its been waiting for other a year to gain traction. Business customers are interested, but it seems like the marketing department is utterly fubared. They even cannot get around to set it up internally to solve their own needs...


Is Patrick McKenzie (patio11) an avid bingo player that lives and breathes bingo?

I have not run a bingo game in, hmm, 6 years or played one in 15. I'm passionate about many things, but bingo is not one of them, except insofar as it lets me experiment with things or lets me help teachers to teach better and more efficiently. You can probably tell, right?

Of course I sound totally focused on bingo when a customer needs to talk to me about it, but that's just acting for the job -- in another context I was the biggest geek around about edge cases in Japanese college entrance exams. If you asked me "How does the exam treat a deaf person with regards to English listening and why?" I would give an informed and enthusiastic answer to that, too, but I don't read commentary on the college exams for fun.


But it appears to me that he is passionate about online marketing/market testing and Bingo cards is just the vehicle he uses to get there. Conversely, my business idea is my passion and doing things like online marketing/market testing is the vehicle I will use to get there.


Yes, but this really depends on the person.

I used to rent out a single family house, with thoughts to expand to multifamily. Along the way I realized that I couldn't find any good software to manage small rental properties and that there was a good sized market for it (bounced the idea off other people I knew doing the same thing).

It's not a technically difficult application and there was definitely money in it, but as much as I tried to focus, my heart simply wasn't in something so boring and I eventually gave up.

Some of us do need to feel passion, or at least strong interest, to build a business around a concept.


When I was in college, I wanted to work in the music industry as a booking agent or concert promoter.

"I like music," I reasoned. So I would love working in the music business, right?

The trouble with that reasoning was that my day to day wasn't spent listening to music or hanging out with bands. It was spent calling people on the phone, or creating marketing, or negotiating, or writing contracts.

"Scratch your own itch" is good advice, but not because of the motivation or energy it will provide. It merely grants you a ground floor understanding of the pain you're trying to solve. Because you are, presumably, among your target market.

As far as motivation is concerned, however, you would be better off focusing on a business with day to day tasks you love to perform.


I don't really agree with this. I successfully did better in less time working full time and having it address a personal problem had nothing to do with my drive to see it through. I just think that at some level you have to be passionate about what you're doing. My product idea was focused on a relatively boring area: sales proposals. What excited me was the idea that I could do some really interesting things to change how proposals are created and presented. That's what helped me get to this point.

Also, doing everything yourself is brutal so don't. I don't have a cofounder but I outsourced the less important tasks so I could focus on the critical ones. I outsourced some content creation (sample proposals that I edited later), some of the code (after laying down the foundation), and even competitive research or personal tasks that would've taken my focus away from my product.

Aside from that, make sure to get support. Find people that are going through the same thing and find great advisors; you'll need both. It's a lot of work but well worth it!


It's certainly possible; I've done better than that in less time. It took me about 4 months to get to beta. Six months before I launched and had recurring revenue. I worked nights and weekends to get it done but I also outsourced some of the less important work.

I'm about 8 months past that point now and I'm extremely glad I took the route that I did. It wasn't easy getting here but totally worth the effort.


Yesterday my colleagues discovered a "Paul the Kraken" app in some app store. Paul is the octopus that correctly predicted the outcomes of all soccer games of the German team in the world cup. The app sold for 0.79€

Now I don't know if it makes any money, but it sounds like something you could throw together in an afternoon (essentially, a random number generator with 50% for yes and no respectively).

Maybe the same thing could be repeated over and over with the current news story of the day. Oil spill? Make an oil spill app (whatever, blackens the screen of the phone or something more fancy like the google maps overlay that was posted on HN).


Yes, that is the depressing truth about the app store: it works like a magnifying glass for society & the only conclusion I can draw is ... junk sells.


Do you mean 6 and 8 hrs per day, or 6 hours over the course of the week and 8 hrs over the course of the weekend? Because if you meant the first, (1) I am skeptical that you have 6 hours of good work in you in addition to your regular job, unless maybe your job isn't coding at all and you live alone and you don't actually like to see humans, and (2) that's 46 hours per week! I sure hope you could build something worth $1000/month after a year of that--and after 4 years of $1000/month you'll have earned $20/hr on your original work.


I wonder if new companies have to check their proposed logos against existing trademarked logos to make sure they don't infringe? If so my idea for you is to build a way for companies to upload their proposed logo and have a search done to find existing similar logos.


Thats not bad. Do you know of any real image search engines that search based on what the image looks like versus text about the image? I image that this wouldn't be too hard for simple logos.


Yeah, there's a couple of initiatives out there mostly aimed at helping photographers makes sure they're images aren't used without license... http://www.tineye.com/ is the only one that comes to mind.


I'm not sure if this helps but if you're considering a subscription system I put this spreadsheet together in Google Docs so you can see how many subscribers at each tier you need and what your costs will be:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AumfOxrn5FGtdEN5U21L...


I am in the same boat. I look for ideas that aren't difficult to implement. That way I can easily build it in evening hours. I have found that marketing and sales takes the vast majority of the time anyway.


I've actually got a few ideas - 3 in the top priority list - that I'm hoping to have developed in the near future if the OP or anybody is willing to partner. I'm situated in South Africa, where there are a wide variety of market gaps ITO technical implementation. The country is market ready with 120% sim penetration and 52% internet access growth in the last few years (about 10m of 45m total).

The benefit would be dual-market penetration, here and in the US. The only downside would be time-difference (7 hours if you're in EST) and we'd have to communicate via Skype. Seeing as the OP wants to achieve $1000 monthly revenue, that means that by current exchange rates, about R8000 local revenue would be the target (If focusing solely on the SA market) which is very feasible ITO a somewhat simple B2B tech product.

Email is brand [dot] magnate {at} g mail {dot} etc. Use Hacker news as subject.

tl;dr - I'm a commerce grad/ start-up owner in South Africa with a few ideas willing to share a good portion of equity with a CTO.


Contracting would make that much money for those hours.


I think the OP is looking for a passive income with an initial effort only.


Taking you literally. $1,000 pm is $12,000 pa. Let's assume passive income from an index fund of 12% pa (for simple maths, though it's also the long-term return of the Australian stockmarket; bumpy short-term). So you would need $100,000 invested.

To save that $100,000 in a year, working 6 hrs per weekday and 8 hrs per weekend day (impossible to keep up) is 6x5+8x2=46 hours pw = 2,392 pa. You'd need to take home $41.8 ph (after tax).

It's theoretically doable.


The best advice that I learned from one of my advisors: look for a medium/big idea that's relatively easy to implement. There are plenty of those in B2B sector.

Why? Because it's as hard to get small amounts of money as it's to get medium amounts of money. And even relatively easy things can reveal interesting (and nasty) problems when you dive into them.

If you don't have any insights what kind of problems companies have, do a couple of gigs for money and start to thing a product based on those.


Pick the simplest idea and implement it in one month.

Sometimes what you think might be cool can turn out to be boring, but only after you have wasted a year on it.


I'd recommend doing something along the lines of: http://www.dollarapp.com/

the principle is quite easy: 1guy develops an iphone application during 1month and sells it for $1. He invests all the revenue in the next app to make it somewhat more fancy/advanced ...


I've seen many of these posts asking about "ideas that will generate x money" coming up lately. While it is certainly possible to make $1000 per month after a year of development, I'm not sure how likely it is.

Product development is risky. Certainly, you can use strategies like developing a "minimum viable product" to mitigate some of the risk, but even doing that can be a lot of work. So unless you are willing to take the risk that you'll spend a year of your time, and not have any revenue generating product, I wouldn't head down this path.


ok, so what would you do instead?


Yes. We created the first version of Freckle in <260 man hours and it earned $2k+ a mo with no real promotion.

What il said - do something that serves people who make money off it. That's the way business is done.


First, do some research, which I suppose this is what you are doing by asking HN. Second, come up with loads of ideas, then decide which ideas you prefer most and try out some of them, like not fully implement them, but just sample them, then, see which works best.

Trial and error. It works every time :)




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