
Ask HN: What is your viable aka money making startup or side project idea? - uibkend
I want to be clear before we start.  I am not looking for fantasy ideas. E.g. Uber for X , AirBnB for Y. No , it doesn&#x27;t work that way.  I do personally know 3 founders who tried this stuff and failed.  Uber is Uber and AirBnB is AirBnb.  No more this for that.  Also, ideas such as AI, deep learning, space travel require more research work than near immediate monetization opportunities available for solo entrepreneur. Notes app , timetracker, project management software have tons of tools and app so I am reluctant to try in these areas.  AI Personal assistant also have large blockade for monetization.  At this point I don&#x27;t have necessary skillset for building AI bots.<p>I am looking for ideas like Improvely, ticket search, fashion cloths and marketplace optimization.<p>I want to know what is your startup idea that could also make money ?<p>We all have ideas but 90 % of them are fantasies or have near zero market potential.<p>You might not have time to realize that idea but I do.  You could help make world better place.  
If I like your idea and find potential in it I will build it myself and will compensate you at good amount at my discretion ( one time ).<p>I also have few of my own ideas but I don&#x27;t think they have potential to make money much or might not have market potential.  Here are few of them.<p>1. Better search engine than Amazon for retail.
2. Porn search engine  ( I don&#x27;t want to try but there is gigantic piece of money )
3. CPC advisor for publishers and advertisers<p>I have background in tech.  Right now I work for one of the top 10 tech companies in Bay area.  My skill set includes business intelligence, system design and architecture, hadoop ecosystem, new business opportunities and optimization.<p>Unfortunately I don&#x27;t have much knowledge of finance but I think over time I will do fine as I am starting from zero.<p>Please let me know your ideas.
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FiatLuxDave
Ok, here's an idea:

Make a content channel which is for nothing but curated ad content. In other
words, advertisers only get to post their ad if it is judged entertaining or
informative enough to count as content. Of course, they pay for accepted
content. The audience is attracted by the interesting ads.

This channel would compete with some aspects of YouTube (those ads that are
interesting enough to get 10 million YouTube views). The idea is that by
providing a curated mix of ads with no repetitive play, that it would be
entertaining enough to be an entertainment destination on its own. Instead of
a channel creating or purchasing interesting content to attract an audience,
the curation and presentation of the ads is the value which is added.

In the ideal case, it becomes a 24/7 channel of nothing but superbowl ads.
Wouldn't you or some of your friends want to watch that?

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MooBah
A) A simple financial options trader for hot ideas.AKA - trading weekly
options on Netflix, or facebook. $ could also be pooled so smaller than 1
option positions could be taken. I know a lot about finance and could help you
make this tool.

B) An email sorting tool. Assigning importance scores to emails and then
having the email predict where you want incoming emails to be in your list
(higher scores = near the top)

C) A tool for entering your course list, and having the page find all of the
cheapest markets to buy your books from. Then transacting the total deal from
one webpage.

Message me if you want me to discuss further any of these ideas. These are
rather simple ideas that could make a good side project. If we actually get
something done, I have much bigger projects.

~~~
alain94040
_An email sorting tool_

There is no contact info in your profile... I'm interested in the email idea,
check out
[https://github.com/alain94040/coolbox](https://github.com/alain94040/coolbox)
for my own list of ideas regarding email.

~~~
MooBah
cool its clamb777@gmail.com - email me if you want to talk about it more.

I'm looking over your stuff and I like where your ideas are headed. You cover
a lot of topics in your write up on Github. My thinking has been towards a
much smaller feature set, specifically one that would help the most busy
people who need the product most. After this has been achieved with a solid
market share of the target market, then we begin adding additional features.

One of the major hurtles, is that email is intrinsically different for
everyone. A great email solution is one accepts this natural hurtle and uses
it to create an economic moat against the inevitable competition.

While I am not an expert in email or programming for email software, I have
developed a feature set and interface that I believe would solve these email
issues.

This project is important to me, because I think it would not only improve my
life and productivity, but the lives of many others who are enslaved by
emails.

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JayNeely
1) 99 Designs for Voice Acting.

Particularly for videogames / commercial video production, there's a lot of
small parts that are strictly scripted, and where I'd imagine it's inefficient
to spend a lot of time searching through voice actors' portfolios when what
you really want is just to hear a good take.

2) WordPress-native, content-aware, publisher-friendly analytics

There's a big gap in analytics software for analytics that are tightly
integrated with the CMS, and focus on providing insights about content, not
just pages. The same piece of content appears in many forms, in many places
across the site, for varying lengths of time. How does content length affect
bounce rate? How long should content stay in a particular slot before it
starts getting diminishing returns on traffic? How much traffic do articles
with a particular tag typically get within their first week since publishing
vs their first year?

Most publishers would be totally unable to answer those questions without a
month-long data integrations effort from multiple sources (assuming they've
done some of the setup work with something like Google Analytics event-
tracking to have the data in the first place), even though it has big
implications for everything from site layout to editorial guidelines to long-
tail traffic potential for content around a topic.

3) Street team marketplace, dynamic printing, and verification system as an
app.

An elance-for-street-team-members site that could let companies post
'missions' for people in any major metro or college campus who want to do
street team tasks, who have signed up through an app. Flyer posting, handouts,
chalking, etc. Street teamers verify their work with the app through a
combination of photos and location-tracking during the time they mark they're
working on a mission.

Companies could optionally use the marketplace's software to create the flyers
or handouts, which allows for the marketplace to both make sure it's print-
shop ready and provide dynamic URLs / QR codes unique for each flyer or
handout, for additional verification and results tracking.

------
coreyp_1
I hate to tell you, but this isn't a good way to go about looking for ideas.
Either:

A.) The people who have ideas don't want to share them, especially for a
nebulous offer to compensate them a "good amount at [your] discretion". Is
that $100 or $100,000? It's a worse gamble than the lottery, especially if
nothing is in writing beforehand.

B.) The idea should be the least of your concerns. You're looking in the wrong
place for the wrong thing.

Now that I've said the harsh words, let me try to help you out.

You seem like you have your head on your shoulders with respect to tech.
That's a good thing. Who you need to partner with, then, is a salesman or
marketing guru. This needs to be someone with business connections or the
tenacity to pound the pavement until sales start rolling in. This must be a
partnership, and not one entered into lightly. Think of it as a marriage: if
you join to the wrong person, it will be painful for a very long time.

I'm a good programmer. I've built a lot of websites and tools across many
different technologies, and I am currently in my 3rd year of PhD studies in
CS. My first business failed because I had a "If I build it, they will come"
mindset. Nobody came, and I lost $12,000. Another project of mine failed
because, although the idea was ahead of its time, I did not have the business
contacts in that field necessary to reach critical mass. A startup that I
worked for also folded because they did not have a valid monetization
strategy.

What I am trying to say is that the idea is a very small part of the equation.
Execution, marketing, and networking are just as important as the technology,
but you haven't mentioned those at all. A good idea will not get you where you
want to go, just as tires will not move you across town. It is a part of the
solution, and an important part, but there are other important parts, too.

My unsolicited advice to you is this: spend more time looking for business
partners that you can trust with your future, both in terms of skill set,
business acumen, and financial integrity. Then, together with them, develop
the idea that you want to pursue. With the right team, you can be very
successful. By yourself, you might as well try playing the lottery. In fact,
the lottery will be quicker and will probably cost a lot less.

~~~
mod
Why do you think you have to lose money to attempt to build a side project?

I built one in my spare time over about a month, with a specific niche market
in mind, and my first customer ready to purchase. It was profitable, not
counting my lost leisure time, from day 1. A few years in it's not made a ton
of money, but it's still profitable every single month without fail, because
even one customer will maintain that.

I have not touched a line of code in ~18 months.

"They didn't come" to my project, either. The niche needs non-adsense sales,
and my partner failed me on that front. Still, I didn't spend a dime.

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corobo
Most of the people here are likely to be techies capable of bringing the good,
feasible ideas to light themselves

Unfortunately I think you've over-specified yourself out of a discussion here.
What ideas do you have and why have you ruled them out?

"A better search engine than Amazon" isn't an idea, how would you do it. What
technologies would you use? Amazon was built at a time when computing wasn't
as powerful as it is now and iterated on and hacked on. If you started from
scratch what would you do? Once you've done that how would you monetize it?

Same with the porn search. Where's the _idea_? You've given us the headlines
but not the articles!

I don't want to come across as harsh, just give your discussion a bit of a
bump -- and my _good_ ideas are my ideas - I'm working on them already!

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atmosx
> We all have ideas but 90 % of them are fantasies or have near zero market
> potential.

Agreed. Who's going to judge which one is which? A random guy working on a
top-whatever company, when even top investors get it wrong 8 out of 10 times?
...

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MichaelBurge
I'd like international ACH/checking transfers to every country out there,
mainly as a tool to pay international freelancers or similar self-employed
people. I can say it's viable because I'd use it.

PayPal does this quite well, but they unfortunately mix this with accepting
credit cards so they're subject to VISA and MasterCard's rules(hence all the
cries of "PayPal shut us down and froze our accounts due to something
triggering their chargeback risk alarm!").

Dwolla looks like what I want, but they're only in the US. Still, I'll
probably use them to start with as an option.

------
anonx
> 2\. Porn search engine

Sounds like a good idea. I wonder why isn't this a thing yet?

Edit: I googled "porn search" instead of using DDG and found out that is a
thing. Looks like, there are tons of porn search engines. That means it's not
enough just to create one anymore. Some unique advantage is needed, isn't it?

P.S.: My humble observation is on Reddit you get downvoted for "Good try
Zuckerberg", "they'll steal my idea", and not accepting "idea is nothing,
implementation is everything". Looks like that's not the case here on HN.

~~~
atmosx
"porndude" for once seems to be rather big one. I used it as a starting point
for an iptables script that re-routed access to porn websites through VPN ;-)

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cdvonstinkpot
A ClearOS (or whatever other Linux/BSD gateway/firewall distro you like) add-
on/plugin that blocks access to/from Tor. Basically a thing that takes the
torproject's published exit node IP address list that updates every 30 minutes
& plugs those addresses into IPTables- or something along those lines.
Currently this functionality doesn't exist for firewall/gateway distros
(AFAIK).

~~~
herbst
Because it is a mini bash script. Nobody aint gonna write polished software
for a 3 line bash script.

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herbst
About the porn thingy. Next to that there are already a lot of these and that
monetizing porn sites really is a pain and very different from everything
else. What makes you believe that there is a need for this?

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teapot01
"I work for one of the top 10 tech companies in Bay area"

Has been on HackerNews for 23 hours

Choose one.

~~~
DrScump
In fairness, he didn't say _which_ Bay.

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widowlark
Good try, Winklevoss twins :^)

~~~
uibkend
Haha... your comment made me chuckle. I am not looking for your next gen. DNA
mapping idea. It could be something as simple as a sales website idea that you
always had but never had time to create one.

