Ask HN: Can my new side project be turned into a business?
I built http://little.io/ over the holidays and I'm wondering whether you guys think there's a business there. The idea is to provide common small features as a service (micro-services). (actually, I started in november but had to drop it for a while)
The inspiration came from a Show HN post a while back for http://www.mapcrunch.com/. I noticed that you could vote for your favorite image and sort by most voted...I wondered how often that same code has been written and will be written. When I showed it to a friend, he pointed me to http://parse.com which is similar (you could call them a micro-service provider for mobile developers, whereas little.io is for web developers).
Anyways, I suck at business and all that, and I'm a pessimist, I personally don't see it, but I thought I'd get some input :)
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Well because you are just helping customers implement certain small features, I'd say you might have a niche consulting position here. Market it like that 1 feature = $X, any 2 features = $Y, and 3 or more features implemented = $Z
From your use case it just seems like you know how to add a few features and will be implementing with companies/sites that need them.
I like the idea very much.
I'm not sure I would use them, I might be too afraid about your service's stability and how long it will be alive etc since you are not (yet?) a big name.
Another micro service idea: geolocation API
I don't get it. Can you provide an example use case?
http://little.io (clickable)