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Ask HN: What are the "boring" businesses for hackers these days?
70 points by thekevan 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 76 comments
There have been a lot of people talking about "boring", lesser skilled business opportunities in the media lately. Things like laundromats and vending machine businesses which have lesser skill and equipment demands compared to starting something like engineering consulting or a blood testing lab.

What are the money making ideas that you have that most people who fit the HN demographic could likely start and make some money doing?




The problem with "boring" businesses as you have described is they are also low-barrier.

Passive income businesses or businesses where an average 16 year old can put in $1 and get $1.25 out are liable to get 'disrupted' by someone who is willing to put in $1 to $1.15 out or someone savvy who can put in $0.90 to get $1.25 out. Terrible market and it's exactly why you see them on YouTube selling courses on how to do it or even just saying their entire business plan because it's that brain-dead.

They are just bad businesses because they have no defensibility or IP generated. Yes, you don't have to work to earn necessarily but you are still hitched quite heavily to being hands-on.

My opinion is a good "boring" business is something that passes unremarkably at Thanksgiving and will never be on magazine covers, also good competition to prove the market is strong enough to have another entrant

If you can tell someone what the business is and they go "So anyway"... fantastic business. You don't want any venture-backed companies whose business plan starts and ends at a snow shovel and a pile of money. You will lose unless your plan is the same and you either have a bigger pile of money or your competitor is much worse. The ideal space is likely an established market with sleepy / stagnant competitors so you can carve off a few percent by addressing what the market is not and having a few million+ a year in revenue.


>My opinion is a good "boring" business is something that passes unremarkably at Thanksgiving and will never be on magazine covers, also good competition to prove the market is strong enough to have another entrant

That is exactly like what I was talking about.


Hotel management software.

There’s like… two? They’re both garbage from my experience both as a frequent flyer and as someone who’s hosted one of them professionally.


I bet that it does not matter that they are garbage. They are so entrenched in their market segment by the basic business requirements and existing business relations that there is nothing to "disturb" without rewritting it feature by feature with help of very expensive subject matter experts. Its a kind of project that takes 5 to 10 years to create MVP (its mainly due to knowledge transfer not technology) and is rather high risk. There is a reason SAP is so big and most of its software is not the best (Im underselling it a bit here ...)


"tech" businesses are hard because technical people usually solve problems they're familiar with.

Some ideas:

* Try to target niche non-technical industries where you know people who can validate, ask where they use spreadsheets.

* Wait for a company to be acquired and build a replacement. Acquirers usually abandon or ruin the product.

* Similar to above, find a service that was once good but has since pivoted the product to focus on the top-of-market whales. Things like gating access behind length sales processes and complicating the product to meet those requirements. Usually at this point existing SMB customers see billing hikes, can't get the time of day and start looking for alternatives. Build a simpler, self-service, down market competitor.


I'm thinking of mostly online things that come to mind that seem to be used by a lot of devs but don't have huge marketing budgets OR are not flashy in the typical sense:

- Google analytics alternatives, like Fathom, Plausible, Simple Analytics, Umami.

- Uptime monitoring services

- Logging, server-side logging, but these seem to be larger companies now like NewRelic, DataDog, Pagerduty

- Niche-specific file hosting, like UploadThing for Next.js, essentially a super simple way to host/upload assets for your Next.js project that removes some of the annoyances when dealing with uploading.

- For this one, I think startup costs might be high but I feel like being a domain registrar is a boring business that could have long term passive possibilities.

- For a web dev HN user, I think one of the more "boring" ideas is to have a web dev agency that focuses on an offline business whose owners are not tech savvy or care not to be. I'm in Portland, OR and I've noticed a few web dev agencies being the main ones creating basic/static websites for clients ranging from plumbing business, landscaping, and other home related repairs. Or for family run business that just care about a simple online presences (hours, contact info, some basic details about their business).


>a web dev agency that focuses on an offline business whose owners are not tech savvy or care not to be.

That is a very good idea, the problem I find with that is that is a FB, Twitter and/or IG page are actually going to drive more business than a website as for as word of mouth and referrals, which is where the real growth is. So then if you are to continue with them, you are getting into social media management and higher fees, which they didn't want to begin with.

The website does help with Google searches and is a general must have box to tick off.


At first I thought so too, a few months ago I got myself into a kitchen remodel and the most common way to find information about local businesses was their websites. Most didn’t have some social sites, a lot weren’t on Yelp (or the ones on Yelp were bad and paid to be on the top), and some didn’t even have up to date websites.

I have been experimenting with a website that might work for this but convincing people to sign up for it has been a wall to climb.


Do social media ads (as in Google and Facebook ads, not management as in posts) for some niches, like car detailers for example.


Yeah small businesses is a think an area where there is quite a bit of money being left on the table. Theoretically squarespace should be taking it, but clearly they're not. I see a lot of local businesses missing the super table-stakes stuff like a maps page with hours and a picture of the exterior. The kindof of stuff that really bumps you in search results and drives first-time visits. Another one is almost every restaurant does not have their menu items synchronized between the different takeout platforms (and their site if they have one), so they're missing sales or disrupting operations there definitely.

It's an annoying business to be in I'm sure, since you're dealing with lots of small clients directly, and there's data-entry stuff. The way to go is probably you focus on sales and automation and farm out the data-entry to less skilled labor? I think the premise that you're a real local human being who can be reached for support, and you can save them from lock-in by zipping up a static site for their nephew to run could be compelling for some small-business-owners. Hopefully you can stay competitive with the nephew since you amortize all the administration stuff over a bunch of tiny, low-traffic pages.


They are small businesses for a reason. They've already been contacted by tons of people who offer to help them with their obvious flaws, and already told those people to f off. Just because somebody has a business doesn't mean they have a brain.


Is it possible to be a domain registrar at all for an average guy? How much is the upfront cost? What services do I need to provide? Eg dealing with DNS?


There are some giant flat fees that ICANN charges to be a registrar:

> What you will pay to ICANN:

> US$3,500 application fee, which is non-refundable regardless of whether the application is approved, denied, or withdrawn. Following an initial review of completed application materials, ICANN will contact applicant with instructions on how to submit payment.

> US$4,000 yearly accreditation fee due upon approval and each year thereafter.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/financials-55-2012-02-...

They also require you to prove that you can immediately obtain up to $70,000 under extreme circumstances, although exceptions are sometimes granted if you're a special case or particularly well-off.


If that's it, then it's more approachable that I thought. This is cheaper than many franchises.


And then there's also fees if you want to register cctlds, e.g. Internetstiftelsen which manages the .se & .nu TLDs requires 10,000 SEK for applying and then 5,000 SEK per year, along with having to meet certain criteria (regarding it security, data protection, etc.)


Is that really all? Those numbers are pretty low even for a small business.


They wouldn't be low for just one dude, but a business sure. ICANN isn't really extorting anyone, tbh.


I like to make converters like https://www.pdf.to and random one off ideas to see if any hit like https://www.microphonetest.com


Thanks for solving this problem. A large part of my job involves pdf conversion to other formats. Thanks a lot!


You seem to be one of the top results of Google. Do you spend money on SEO/Ads?


In google? That's surprising to hear. I was under the impression it was on a blacklist at google since I've never seen PDF.to rank. https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/82597748/my-sit..., it was also in the "bing jail" for what ever reason, but that was fixed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35677086

I don't do any SEO/Ads, although one of the noteable links came from paying a outreach company to reach out to reporters and one wrote an article https://www.lifehacker.jp/article/lht_pdf-to/, although that was many iterations ago. Just been focusing on improving the functions and design since that initial launch phase back in 2019


Is pdf.to profitable? I like the design, very clean

edit: Oh! You're the guy that runs Yout


Oooh, I really like pdf.to! Are you getting paying customers?


yes it has a few


I was expecting a Micro Phone Test! Damn, haha.


Has the monetization been successful?


A former coworker now runs a bandsaw blade sharpening business and he also has a portable wood sawmill that he takes to people's properties to mill lumber for them. It's not cheap to hire him to bring his sawmill to you and mill your trees but in some cases it's the cheapest way for people to deal with downed trees, or some people are very excited to be able to actually use the trees on their property to build things so don't mind the cost.

It doesn't seem like his endeavors require a TON of smarts beyond knowing how to sharpen blades and run the mill. But the human interaction aspects of running the business seem to be why he succeeds at it. He's prompt, thorough, upfront, on time, and a VERY hard worker. Lots of these aspects of running a boring business seem to be done very poorly in general, often because the boring business owner hires inexpensive staff, so set yourself apart from the rest by being really good at them if you start a boring business.


Folks have described my uptime monitoring business as an online laundromat, so I guess that's a "boring business"


That's exactly what I mean. What stack do you use?


Node.js, React, Postgres - boring technology :)


I hope this doesn't come across as critical; this is a terrible question. The thing that makes 'boring business' an opportunity is that the tech is irrelevant. How did you identify the market? What are your demographics? What unique problem are you solving? How did you identify an unserved customer segment? These are the questions that should be on the forefront of your mind. Boring businesses are rarely if ever engineering challenges. They are people challenges. Once you identify that the tech stack becomes a commodity. I know because I made this mistake numerous times in my early career as a software entrepreneur.


100% - I could've built this in PHP if I knew it


how did you come up with this idea, given that alternatives already exist?


Alternatives exist for everything. The goal isn't to come up with a totally unique idea, but rather to find a market that is sufficiently competitive in which you can carve out a tiny slice. For something like an uptime monitor, you aren't going to make millions of dollars per year, but you could easily carve out a 500/mo income for practically no effort. With a little more effort and advertising, you might even be able to make it your full time job.


you think so? given that there are several free options. what kind of features are people willing to pay for?


You'd be surprised! One thing to consider is that _people_ want free stuff, but _businesses_ get to write off a lot of expenses, meaning that for most businesses, $100/mo is nothing at all and any random employee could probably set it up without going through a whole bunch of financial stuff. Find 10 small companies that need to ensure their website is up, charge em $99/mo, and now you're making $1000/mo.

Could they use a free one? Sure. But most companies won't think twice about paying $100/mo for something. And you don't need _every_ company to pay you $100/mo, just 10, 15, 20 of them. And there are hundreds of thousands of companies out there.

The other thing is that there aren't a ton of uptime monitors out there because they don't make money; quite the opposite, there are a ton of uptime monitors out there because they create value and people are willing to pay for it!

To put it a slightly different way, there's a reason there are a million pizza restaurants and burger joints. It's not a zero-sum game! If there are five pizza restaurants, then there's likely room in the market for a sixth. Similarly, if there are 99 uptime monitor companies, there's room for a 100th!

If you find an area where there are _no_ competitors, that should actually be a red flag: why aren't there any? what's wrong with the business? is it because you're a genius and thought of something nobody else has thought of (let's face it, you may be a genius, but this is very unlikely), or is it because there isn't any money to be made (ding ding, we have a winner)?

Honestly, the best way to think of business ideas is to look at businesses that you already like, then just do what they do. Yeah, you're competing against an established player, but markets are rarely 100% dominated by your competitor. There's almost always room to squeeze out a lifestyle business. Plus, they've already done the R&D and validated the market! Win/win, honestly.


i agree with your points, especially the red flag. that's pretty clear. and the reason why so many offers exist also makes a lot of sense.

i am not sure about the pizza comparison because that's a question of capacity and location too. in any given location there is only a few and maybe there is room for a sixth but not for many more.

for a monitoring service the question is: what drives the diversity instead of everyone using the same one service?

why would i trust a new service instead of one others have recommended?

like email: there are thousands of email providers, but only a handful huge ones like gmail. is that different, or is it the same with monitoring services?

i guess my question is: how would i break into the market and find my first customers?


> how would i break into the market and find my first customers?

It's the Field of Dreams model. Build it, and they will come. Do some basic marketing. Worst case scenario, you built an uptime monitor for yourself!

I'm not sure diversity has to exist, honestly. If I'll pay one service $10/mo for uptime monitoring, and you have an identical uptime monitoring service for $10/mo, then it's just a flip of a coin which one I'll go with, right? There's no differentiating factor other than randomness. So go for it. Build it. Put it out there. You'll get _someone_. And over time, you can iterate based on the needs of the demographics that have chosen you. Maybe the people gravitating towards your stuff are more interested in cron jobs than websites, or maybe they're monitoring competitors rather than themselves, or maybe they're keeping tabs on government websites. Who knows?

You don't have to have all the answers right now. Build something and see what happens, then iterate from there.


This is exactly how I operate too, clone then iterate. Just make a clone with the basic features as your competitor and then naturally you'll have thoughts like, "hey, this could be better this way." You only learn once you start, not before.


I had a specific need for my own clients that other tools didn't fix in the right way.


that's a good starting point. the best starting point i think, actually.

how did you grow your users/customers?


tons of stuff actually: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers


that's a very nice writeup, thank you.

for one it shows that you did have a differentiating value proposition, and also it doesn't look like the low effort project that others suggest would be possible.

can you share some milestones? how long did it take to get to 100$ 1k$ 2k$ monthly revenue?


a SaaS is anything but a low effort project - an info product (like a short E-Book or a video course) would be significantly easier to sell.

I stopped sharing financial information publicly - but it's taken 3 years to look like it'll reach my salary.


I'd imagine stuff like SSL certificate expiry monitoring, CT log monitoring, or IP address geolocation / reputation. I assume a handful of fortunes have been made this way. But you're competing with people who can outspend you on Google Ads, have enterprise sales teams, and stuff like that. No free lunch!


I actually recommend working for a non-tech company (F500, financial or otherwise) and then start to evaluate what's broken.

You'll find things like website development, a need for lightweight CRM, regulatory needs, accounting, etc.

You should price 10% of the savings. So if you save a company $100k/yr, you should charge $10k/yr.

You'll get a benefit, they'll get a benefit, and you can prove that your product is worthwhile to other companies.


Contact your local sawmill and ask if they have a lot of questions for cnc-milled parts, like window trims or the like. My friendly mill owner suggested this, he would do it himself but he can't find any competent people to start this.


I'm not sure what the "this" in "start this" is. What problem would you be solving or addressing for him?


If the sawmill doesn't have the means to fulfill these custom made parts at small/no batch sizes, a single person startup might fill the gap, and get their business just by asking nicely at the sawmill that's just not set up to help these people, but might be the first point of contact?

I have to admit I'm also unsure what GP means. :D


That's exactly what I meant, sorry that I couldn't respond earlier. It's about small batch production for custom orders. Mill owner will happily refer clients to you if you are his regular customer for wood.


Producing "cnc-milled parts, like window trims or the like"


I set up ticketing systems for MSPs. I configure invoicing systems. I set up auto onbilling for Microsoft products. I integrate ERPs to Xero. I set up payroll systems. I automate processes.

Much of it is through integrations not code. If I wanted, I could just cut out the custom integrations and just rely on plug-n-play / third party integrations.

It's an honest living. But I am uninspired by it, so am pivoting.


I've found that access control devices (biometric, nft) that are used in small offices have terrible software and useless interfaces. The devices itself can be procured easily from China. Maybe building something like this would be a good boring business.


Not really something that requires little skill, but bug hunting is a decent income (if you burn through enough).

Otherwise, making services and seeing what sticks. There are millions of these that go unnoticed but are still going by on API fees. Or they just go nowhere :P


> bug hunting

I read this as "pest control", and literally thought about living bugs. Bed Bugs in particular c/would be a multimillion dollar business in the US, I believe.

In general, to the OP I'd recommend finding a nuisance. The bigger the nuisance, and the more people affected, the larger potential.


Are there any platforms specifically for claiming bounties or is this more of an opportunistic thing?


You mean like HackerOne? Plenty of people (typically white-hat security researchers) make a career out of HackerOne bounties.


I think you asking for “boring”, but meaning less-techie then using “hackers” is confusing here.

Are you just asking for easy, low-tech (or lower/simpler tech) biz ideas or what?


I think boring in this sense is no VC backed, ad revenue, going viral, <insert hyped tech thing> related business that could use software. To put it another way, solved problems in the tech sense (I.e the tech choice doesn’t matter) but can be profitable.


"Boring" just means it isn't a super sexy or exciting business idea. There's often a lower technical bar, but not always.


Make an Upwork profile, do little jobs, over time do bigger jobs.


True, but I was wondering more about having your own business rather than working for someone on their platform.


i got the impression that upwork takes a lot of upfront effort to apply for projects, reducing the income. and don't they require invasive monitoring software nowadays so that i'd be forced to use a separate computer to do it? (because i am surely not going to allow any monitoring on my personal device)


Can't outcompete those who would do it for $5/hr


I read an article in the Financial Times about how there is a major shortage of CPAs (licensed accountants) in the United States. Something like 65% of CPAs are 55 or older. This sounds like an opportunity to me.


while it might, CBDCs are just around the corner and with automatic, transaction level taxes. there will be no need to file for 80% of people. Yes this will be a huge privacy issue but compared with the current system of guessing how much you supposedly owe the IRS.. people will jump at the time savings alone.


Regular people filing taxes has little/nothing to do with CPAs, who mostly work at the larger accounting firms servicing corporations, who will always have tax situations to deal with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms


Look at bookkeeping. Not taxes. Super lucrative and easy to do.


Why start a business? Buy a sleepy business - there’s already customers paying money and it’s unlikely to get disrupted

Laundromat etc have higher value multiplier because they’re passive. Something like a large plumbing or trade business is great because you can have someone manage it but lower multiple.

Real estate can be good but typically hard to do better than 10% cash on cash return. Vs a business could be 100% on cash return. But obviously more risk and active management needed, and the real estate is more likely to appreciate. All about risk vs reward


Productized services comes to mind. Things like LinkedIn automation, lead generation, website management, scraping, etc.

Use your technical skills to automate 80% of the job, then hire the last 20%


I have been thinking along the same line as boring ideas that make money. And I have come to conclusion that you need to build or acquire assets. A business owner still is on/has a job but an entrepreneur has an assets.

Assets can be anything : an online tool, saas, an ebook, graphics, icons, stocks etc.

So, create or acquire digital assets.


https://www.reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/

https://www.warriorforum.com/offline-marketing/


My guess would be MSPs or other cheap tech work - still a million small businesses that need it, and it doesn’t really scale that well so there’s a good amount of competition.


Or some sort of VAR.


I always wondered what VA stood for in VAR given that you must buy from a VAR as the manufacturer/editor will not sell directly anyway.


Agency work / consulting




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