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Help HN: Want to build small web app for learning and side income.
85 points by maheshs on Oct 10, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments
Hi Guys, I am long time HN follower. I always been benefited from HN community.

I am a full time developer and can code in ASP.NET (both web form and MVC), PHP (also i am beginner in ruby).

I want to build web app from which i can earn $200 - $400 per month.

Its not a big amount but it gives me following benefit which is more valuable for me.

1. Motivation for bigger move. 2. Getting experience in running SaaS based apps. 3. Side income. 4. Good learning about business, marketing and other non programming things.

I know i can make these kind of money though some freelancing but that option i am not looking for now.

I can invest my time 2-3 hours on weekdays and 5-6 hours on weekends (around 20 hours in week). Also i can invest up too $300 if i have to do buy some sort of services/hardware etc.

Problem is I am not been able to think about any web app idea which solves some problem. Please give me some idea about any web app which I should build.

I am not from US or Europa.

I am having high hopes from HN community.

Thanks in advance.




I'd say you posted in the right place because lots of people here have the opposite problem - too many ideas, not enough time. Here's my list of random ideas that I feel can make some money each month if executed well: http://bulletxt.zetabee.com/share?n=1548888784&h=SHdydmJ...

I haven't updated it in a few months because I've been busy with an interesting project. Maybe something on the list will inspire you. You're welcome to take an idea directly too if you wish. Do let me know so I can move it down to the baked list :)


How would you monetize these? Mostly from just adding Adsense to the page? [For example, I'm looking at the geolocation of #hate/#love tags, and the imbored-counter.]


That works. In my experience, 1k visitors = $1. If you want $100/month, that's $3/day = 3k visitors/day. Not impossible to get with something catchy/popular. Make four of these and you hit your goal. It's not easy but it's not impossible either.


Please, there is something called niche and keywords in Adsense.

I have had a website in the barcode niche and the click was as high as $5-$7 with a 2-3% conversion ratio. That's like $15/100 visitors only and yes I was making that much.

You can check the PPC in adwords for scanner tools, it's exteremly high.


That countdown app is exactly what my SO is building for a specific use case - a generic, good, customisable one would be great.


I would go to Elance and look through the things people are paying for. If you can find something that lots of people are buying but can be commoditized you've found a winner. Since you are experienced in PHP, make some PHP component that people want but the current solutions are crap. Web Developers will easily pay $100 for something of quality that will save time. I think it is easier to sell a digital product than SaaS if you want to do this part time. It's nice to get your money and have no further obligation to your customer. As far as marketing, you can submit a PAD of your software product. That will give you a surprising amount of free traffic. Also, you can giveaway licenses of your product via bloggers. To accept payments I use FastSpring. It looks professional and there are no setup or monthly costs (so no risk). Good luck!


You can spend less than that $300 until you get going if you use GoogleAppEngine, where you'd only end up paying if you get higher levels of usage.

Rackspace cloud will cost $10 a month for the basic server if you need to not use java/python, as it sounds like you might need to. You theoretically can do Ruby on GAE via a java implementation, and php I think...

If you need web design, you're going to be a little short there likely to get it done, but you may be able to learn enough to get going there.


Second this, GAE is the default platform for almost all of my side projects because of how quickly you get up and running, and due to the generous limits.


I use GAE as well for all my side projects. I recommend a service such as spreedly or recurly for billing.I've used PayPal subscriptions and 2checkout in the past but they suck. For design I recommend the minimalist approach such as letter.ly until you can hire a designer.


For a design / template start out by using something off ThemeForest.net, then once you're making some money, hire someone to redesign it!


Just to also mention heroku is free too until you use 5MB of database size, which is great for getting it out there, and depending on your type of site 5MB might get you quite a way.


Are there other services like this for php or more python ones? I'd though GAE was really the only one in its type.


Play with Google CSE and build niche search engine http://www.google.com/cse/

I built a nifty search engine using Google CSE API over a weekend. It got over 30,000 unique visitors per day and made $2,000 per month.

It was probably one of the most advanced search engine built on Google CSE.


Made? What happened to it?


After running for a year on Google CSE. I built my own search platform and was able to grow it to over 100,000 visitors per day.


How much are you making now?


At it's peak, I made $15,000 per month.

Then I pulled the plug, because most of the users were using it to search movies and music. I had no legal troubles, but I did not want to stay in the gray area.


Can I have URL of your service?


The name of search engine was ShareMiner, it was very popular. The website is now dead, but you can read about it at:

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/shareminer-search-web-files/

http://www.killerstartups.com/Search/shareminer-com-search-t...

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2008/01/pl...


How did you got the traffic?


I built the search engine, then I bought a crappy website which had 20,000 visits per day. It was just a form which redirected to Google.com and it looked like this: http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1602/pl_playlis...

Then I launched my version of search engine on the same domain, the new version ran on our own platform and looked like this: http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/images/shareminer-file-search.p...

After launch of new version, I was able to grow the traffic organically and with SEO.


Here's a few links with ideas:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/businessideas/

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

http://www.ahbbo.com/ideas.html

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/

http://www.coolbusinessideas.com/

I've taken all these from a list in the 'Start Small, Stay Small' book here: http://www.startupbook.net/

Good luck!


I'm the author of the 'A Startup A Day' blog listed above. There several hundred ideas on the blog, but feel free to email me and I'm happy to help you pick out a few that fit what you're looking for. Contact info is in my profile.


When you're looking at ideas, filter not just for how much a particular idea interests you but how much it will cost to market. A productivity app that addresses a specific issue, for example, has a much more defined, low cost route to market than a website where you need to work with multiple manufacturers and attract consumers to launch a crowd-sourced clothing line production website.

The simplest formula is: 1. Solve a specific problem; 2. Tell the people who have the problem that you've solved it; 3. Convert them; 4. Profit. If the number of people you need to reach with #2 is vast, it's less likely you will reach #4 with the kind of budget you're talking about.


Talk to people about what sucks about their job. Pick the problem with the most whines per lines of codeit will take to fix. Fair warning: $200 a month projects get drastically bigger if you figure out marketing.


I'm in the same boat with similar skill set. Do you want to get-together on IM for some brainstorming? May be we can work together on something. Contact is in the profile, if you are interested.


You should see if one of these works for you - http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html


There are some very clever ideas in there. Number 4 ("A website that you can submit your design and work with vendors to manufacture your own clothes line") is something I'm sure my wife would take advantage of.

I wonder how much of a market there is for something like this, or how many people want to be a micro-boutique?


That exists already. It's fairly new, but I forgot the name.


http://www.garmz.com/


Numbers 1, 2 and 4 are very easy to satisfy. Several people have already posted lists of ideas that they and others maintain. I seem to recall Y-Combinator posting lists of the types of projects they wish to look at in the future too, so it would be worth searching for them. If you can't self host then .NET hosting is going to cost you around US$10 a month, although there are deals to be had - I think I pay $35 for 6 months of web and SQL Server hosting with a company that is passable for what I need it for. Unless you have a real passion to learn something new, I'd stick with the languages you now, it will be much quicker to get to where you need to go than if you learn a whole new language.

But the problem is in monetization. Firstly if you can get an idea from start to making money in 6 months (for example) then I don't think there is really a cap on what you can make, I can't see a reason why $400 per month would be all you would want to make, and if you make something that can make money you should always be able to find new users (an exception to that might be if you made something very specific to only a few people and had an easy way to market it - eg something 100 HN users might like and no one else).

But defining a web app that you can develop and easily make money is not easy. Most people's "idea lists" have lots of very interesting ideas, few of them I can ever imagine making a penny. My suggestion would be to look around you, you have a job, is any of the software you develop something you can clone and sell to other businesses (there are legal issues there, but you can often work around them and it depends where you are). Are there everyday tasks that people are using spreadsheets or Access DB's or paper to do that you could create a system for and charge $10 a month? Find an idea like that, spend 10, 20 or 50 dollars on Google Adwords pointing to a fake sales page and see if you have a market. Good luck.


I totally agree on the latter point. Before you code anything, as your primary goal here is making money, get an Adwords voucher and see if you can get traffic to your site from ads. If people are clicking, then there's probably something there. If nobody visits your site after a bit of promotion, what's to say customers will visit when there is actually a product there? You can go right as far as the credit card signup page, depending on how you morally view misleading potential customers.


I also have a webapp to keep track of this: http://somebodybuildthis.com

As others have said, Good luck! :-D


"I can't see a reason why $400 per month would be all you would want to make"

There is no cap, but my intention is building the stuff that even work for very niche community.


Start with Paul Graham's essay about startup ideas:

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Phrase the idea as a question worth exploring: can I build a startup on the idea of [insert idea here]?

To quote:

> Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.

So what I suggest you do, is build a webapp based on some idea, but don't count on it making you much money. You'll still be getting experience and learning how to run and manage your servers (and that's really the core of your business).

$200/mo is quite manageable if you just put Google ads and have a decent amount of visitors. To do that, you don't need to have a business idea, you just need a site that provides some cool service that a decent amount of people would want to use it.

Point being, you don't have to hunt for a business idea.


even I am a full time employee (but m a Fresh Graduate). I have been seriously giving a thought on starting something of my own or at least deploy some application on apps engine and throw it for review on HN. I work on Java. Currently located at Cornell University, working on Semantic Web Application. Interested in Information retrieval and Machine Learning. Currently working on Semantic search and developing a small hobby application of entity finder. Can I be of help to anyone ? or anyone wants to work together towards some idea/application ? I struggle to take out some time for hobby projects with all day packed with project and assignments ( I have taken some additional courses in Comp. Sci here) but still there is this constant urge to do something more interesting and throw it out to people.


Not sure if you are still a student or working full time.

I have few ideas but I guess only student would be interested to work on it.

These ideas wont make you millionaire but you will definitely make enough money to pay your rent and will help you learn how to do business in general.


I am full time employee but can invest time (around 15-20 hours).

My mission is simple; learn business by doing business even earning is small.


Have you started working on anything ?


The $1,000,000 dollar question... Literally


Well, the $1,000,000 answer is worth $0 if you can't make something out of it.


sorry! no offence... but this made me laugh... hahaha :)




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