
Ask HN: Which is the richest IT niche for a 2-3 years project? - DrNuke
I’ve just been asked this by a couple of young engineers in search of a new project for quick and good (€10+m) monetisation in, say, 2-3 years and starting now from scratch. I have put fintech cybersecurity forward as the most liquid and possibly the richest niche out there for a 3 years attempt. Any better tip? Thanks. EDIT: project starting from the EU.
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anonu
Go to the Craigslist front page and find an item you can build a company
around. Here are ideas:
[http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5304ca1d6da811c54d9...](http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5304ca1d6da811c54d946b6e-960/disaggregation%20of%20craigslist.jpg)

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segmondy
might as well suggest for one to pick up a dictionary or yellow page and build
a business around any random word they pick.

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anonu
Craigslist is a marketplace. They brings two sides together in a transaction.
However transaction costs are high. Primarily because there is no security or
insurance.

The front page gives you a template for what types of marketplaces you can
build and solve some of the transaction costs problems for users.

Dictionary is not going to be too helpful here.

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bdcravens
> I have put fintech cybersecurity forward as the most liquid and possibly the
> richest niche out there for a 3 years attempt.

Do you think "a couple of young engineers" can build that kind of expertise in
3 years?

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wepple
+1

DrNuke, please reconsider what you’re doing here.

3 years is hardly enough to understand the cyber security problem space, let
alone build useful products/solutions.

At best, they’ll fleece some unaware VCs, sell rubbish to companies via flashy
PR, and exit or collapse.

This field is _hard_.

~~~
icedchai
They can probably build some snake oil in 3 years.

~~~
killyp
Wouldn't even take that long. I could throw together a flashy "antivirus" that
looks really good and does nothing more than a simple file signature lookup in
a month. I could probably also get some sales of it to small companies that
don't know any better. But to be ground breaking in the cyber security world
and build something that is the foundation of a new company is just not
feasible in 3 years without massive help from VCs, which isn't going to happen
without a PoC or connections.

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nickpsecurity
Port some FOSS they're already depending on a lot on OpenBSD on hardware you
certified to work. Self-hosted machines and bare-metal servers from at least
one third party. Charge for licensing (say "license") the binaries with
support included while putting the modified source in a repo somewhere for the
masses to benefit. Use money you don't keep as profit to repeat the process
for more software. Alternatively, after an OpenBSD port, rewrite the same
software in Rust with all checking on (eg integer overflow) plus thorough
equivalence and fuzz testing. I chose these two because they have excellent
documentation along with helpful folks that would probably love to help out
any team actually making something like that happen with real, production-
worthy, open-source code.

wepple is right about security requiring tons of knowledge and experience to
do right in general. That said, even inexperienced programmers with no
security knowledge can vastly reduce the number of hacks and downtime their
customers deal with by following my recommendation to use safe languages with
minimal or no runtimes on secure OS's. Obviously, there's stuff they'll miss
that requires experienced folks to spot. So, bring in security consultants for
reviews and/or do bounties early on when revenue is low or you're still on
investment money. Then, as you grow enough to afford more people, hire at
least one, security expert with lots of proven experience in avoiding and
finding flaws in the type of software you're selling. They can also help with
ports in between security reviews to get more ROI.

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durkie
maybe they need a name for this type of thing. something about getting rich,
but quickly?

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abakker
It's funny, but who isn't interested, right? lots of wealth and comfort in
just 3 short years? sure, sign me up!

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claudiulodro
Since it doesn't sound like they have strong domain expertise in any area, I'm
going to recommend eCommerce. If you can create a fad (e.g. fidget spinners,
Razor scooters, ICO, etc.) and quickly capitalize on it that's going to be the
quickest way to make $10mm+.

It's a heavily luck-based plan, but if there was a no-luck 3-year plan to
making $10mm+ we would all be doing that instead of whatever we're doing now.

~~~
stcredzero
"No Luck 3 Year $10M" sounds like the new 4 Hour Work Week.

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codewritinfool
Nobody can answer this with certainty for you. If they could, who wouldn't be
pursuing the same thing?

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alex_duf
Not everyone is interested in high-risk high-reward projects

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bdcravens
True, but OP sounded like they were looking for low-risk high-reward projects,
at least how I read it.

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jarsin
Blockchain + AI + Bio Tech. Store young models DNA on blockchain. Then unleash
an army of decentralized AI bots to discover eternal youth.

You can raise like 100 million by setting up a Wordpress site with the above
idea.

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mwj
LOL oh only 10 mill within 3 years... that is the holy grail of startups.

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jonathanpeterwu
Fintech based AI services comes to mind, consumer fintech products seem to be
having a moment in the EU with all the progress banking has had there vs here
in the US.

~~~
lee101
I had some luck developing [https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz) an AI
based crypto currency prediction platform, I do find that teaching AI can be a
very hard subject to grasp for some but one of the most rewarding I'd say.

Lots of AI problems to solve in this space: anomaly detection to help
understand risk, data collection/text mining to understand current trends in
markets, clustering groups to find groups of for example high engaged users or
people who should be shown ads instead of being pushed to pay for a product
because they are likely not going to purchase ect

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cellis
There's a way to do this: Look at the INC 5000 list and see which companies in
IT were built in less than 3 years to X revenue.

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segmondy
You don't search a project to make money, you figure out problem people are
currently having, you solve it, provide value and get paid for it. Not that
simple, but that's the way to approach you product. Begin with other people's
problem not some speculative niche.

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napolux
GAMBLING?

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ozim
I think that was the inspiration for question: [https://www.inc.com/cameron-
albert-deitch/2018-inc5000-gitla...](https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-
deitch/2018-inc5000-gitlab.html)

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cosmon0t
A company that converts VC dollars into a decentralized, culturally immutable
currency, preferably made of some sort of highly conductive, wear-resistant
material that people will store and exchange for goods and services.

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lurcio
In EU I like the growth prospects and environment for E-commerce - of course,
riding the wave while differentiating from what Amazon is aiming to achieve...

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zitterbewegung
If I recall correctly video games have the fastest turn around for a
profitable startup . Understanding the space could be done in a few years .

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rambojazz
Do they? I've always thought of games as "few make the millions, everyone else
make zero".

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servercobra
I'm pretty sure that's all startups though.

But video games do seem like something that can go from nothing to "product
that lots of people pay for" pretty quickly, relative to a SaaS business or
something similar.

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lotyrin
Games, like music, culinary and other arts have greater-than-background levels
of competition because many are drawn to them by artistic motives.

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lj3
an AI driven VR product built on the blockchain.

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thisisrajat
Something related to digital nomads and remote work. If you crack this, you'll
easily scale to $1M+ if not $10M+.

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fuddle
They may pick the right niche, but at the end of the day it's about the
execution not the idea.

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rambojazz
Wait a minute, let me take my crystal ball...

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the_other_guy
How not to start a business: the post

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cvaidya1986
Crunchbase

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napolux
PORN?

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jonathankoren
Isn’t today’s porn industry essentially a low margin commodity business?

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cableshaft
If you're making content or a site with content you've produced, it's probably
very low margin at this point. If you're making a platform that can take
everyone's content, there's probably still a lot of money to be made in it, if
you have a new or compelling take on (because there's several big platforms
now that most people go to, like most people just go to YouTube). Although
that's true with everything, pretty much. Books, music, movies, video, etc.

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jonathankoren
Yeah, but if you’re taking the aggregate / pirate approach, you now have a
bunch of capital expenditures for streaming that much video, and the. Have the
whole SEO / advertising budget. At least child porn can be outsourced (at
least at first) to just downloading hashes from the NCMEC.

