
Ask HN: How do you get side project ideas? - __tmp12345__
Paul Graham says build something that seems missing in your life. However, I think I failed to notice any.<p>Do you guys have any suggestion on how to find interesting ideas for side projects? Should I go to meetups and talk to more people?<p>Would really appreciate your answers!
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donmatito
My 2 cents. Coding a side project is "fun hard", for a developer, while
marketing and selling it is "hard hard". You could consider for your side
project, an app using the API of a platform such as Heroku, EventBrite, Slack,
Shopify, and so on. These platforms could help you make the marketing (a bit)
easier, by exposing you to users in their app store/directory/marketplace. As
a result, that's one of my criteria for side project.

As far as finding an interesting problem to solve. PG explains in a follow-up
essay, I think, that most people get used to suboptimal situations. We, as
human, are very good as rationalizing painful situations, processes, etc, as
normal and good. You need to take a step back when something is long, boring,
repetitive or annoying. Is it really necessary? Couldn't it be automated?
Question your assumptions :-)

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nedwin
Two approaches I've taken: What are the jobs in my industry that everyone does
but no one enjoys? I ran a digital agency for a while. No one wanted to do
maintenance work on a site, or security work. Or low budget work. We sat down
and figured out more efficient ways to solve this problem and found people
willing to refer the work into us.

What are the things in my company that suck to deal with? We sat down and
listed out all the annoying things that we have to deal with on a day to day
basis. Poorly run meetings, endless approvals on certain projects, an
inflexible CMS...

Plenty of problems out there, just need to look.

One more approach: find a customer set you want to work with and grill them on
their problems. What does a day in the life of X look like? What is the most
painful thing about doing x? Why is that? What ways have you tried to solve
that problem? Ideally x is a very boring industry or role.

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sheraz
You are not looking hard enough!

But maybe you should find an open source project you like and see how you can
start contributing in a meaningful way (meaningful to you).

Baring that, THINK SMALL. Think about one tiny thing to make, and then code
the hell out of it:

\- documentation \- build process \- tests \- cross platform-ness \- packaged
for distribution (deb, Rpm, pip, npm, whatever)

I say all of this because a side project is often so much more than just the
thing you want to code. Most of us devs would like to share our work, and the
things listed above help other devs see that this project is serious and
warrants our time / effort.

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peterschroeder
What I do is I look at the products I absolutely love. Then I think about if
the concept can be applied to any other industry.

Think Uber for... (But seriously, don't do 'the Uber of [anything]'.

My latest side project I was thinking about a product I love and I thought
about how I use Buffer for social media management. They have made my life, so
much easier! From there I thought about if the concept could be applied to any
other industry. I realized the messaging industry had nothing like it!
Needless to say, I am not working on 'the Buffer of messaging', but that is
where the idea spawned and I refined it from there.

