Ask HN: How do you come up with side project ideas?

I'm the opposite, I always see opportunities. I'm marketing side of the world so I probably look at things a little differently from many here. My biggest challenges are time & reasonably priced development. I work fairly long hours and have a young family so pursing things is hard and there is only so much finance I can commit given my income is better than average but I'm not exactly rolling it it. I'm trying to find some affordable developer(s) I could fund to work for me in more affordable countries like India/Philippines/Indonesia but it's hard to find good people cheaply. I've used a guys in India for basic projects but found the quality and attention to detail on work terrible. The time cost to me on unessential back and forth was huge. I'm considering trying to find someone in the Philippines next as I've heard they can deliver better work and hopefully work a bit more independently... realised I'm ranting a bit...

But for me, I spot ideas in day to day life. I generally see market opening when I find personal frustration with something. Or see something existing that could be used in a new market. The latter can be good. Look at a few new hot start-ups and think to yourself, how would this work in an entirely new markets & user-case?

I keep a notebook when I spot these gaps/opportunities in the market that could be challenged. It can be frustrating when 6/12 months later you see companies forming in these niches.

Interesting question. Going to have a shot at answering it.

You said:

What if nothing itches?

Then the obvious thing is, find things that itch, or rather, pain, others. (It's been said on this site before. more than once.) Find processes that people do as part of their work or business, in which they have some pain, i.e. some area with friction, that potentially can be done better, using software (if they don't use any, or better software, if they do). Go to some meetups. And I don't mean tech meetups. We techies (not all) tend to live in our own echo chamber or bubble; I like to combine the two words and call it a bubble chamber, just for the heck of it - not really the same as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber

So I mean business networking events. Talk to people there, introduce yourself, ask them about their business, and at least some of them will probably tell you about some problems they are having, without you even having to ask. I've seen it myself in real life. Some of the projects I've worked on, I interacted with people on the (factory) shop floor, and they often talked about issues with the existing software or with their work. Some of those issues could be made better with software.

There are a lot of ways to come up with an idea if nothing itches:

1- Learn a new technology and you realize there is a missing feature in between 2 technologies and now you can full-fill it and make it happen: it can be a Rails gem, Node package, some library, or a service.

2- Try talking to peers and folks who you feel are smarter than you, if you can be influenced by them, they can give you a good insight on what solution is missing around you or in a specific field.

3- CHECKOUT PG's essay on coming up with startup ideas: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

4- DON'T push it, don't focus on coming up with an idea just for the sake of doing something. Once you let that go, some ideas will come to you.

5- Go to communities like /rails or /webdev or just go on Github and do a random search and see what people have built and left it alone, maybe you can fork something then rebuilt it or go on top of it.

6- I personally endurance through books, tweets, blogs, hackersnews, reddit, quora, github, my client startups every f#$kin content I can find when I get excited and want to build something :)! So I'm not sure if that is the smartest way to do it all the time.

Jesus, I have more ideas that I can count, totally overflow my brain. Of course the first version is dazed and confused but over time some of those (those on whom I spend most time on) seem to come out somewhat polished...

IT is only a hobby to me, but all in all, until now I'm a sucker when it comes to implementations. Most of my projects are abandoned the moment I realize that I solved the hard part and now I have to do boring part (e.g. the hard part is the back-end and boring part is the front-end which never gets finished/polished/presenable-to-thir-parties).

The best way to come up with an idea, is to try to automate something in your daily life. Not something that bothers or something that someone else will find attractive. Doesn't even have to make sense to others, up to the point where it is ready.

Anyway good luck :-)

ps. To give an idea, I had thought of 4Square-like idea long before 4Sq. And at least 5-other things that turn-out to be startups and then big corps. But keep in mind that ideas are cheap, implementation costs.

There's a lot of great suggestions in this topic. Here's what I want to add:

"Serious Creativity" by Edward de Bono - excellent book on this topic. Explains a lot about inventing new ideas.

/r/SomebodyMakeThis - subreddit where people post ideas for apps and projects.

Look for new emerging markets/technologies. For example recently I've discovered for myself Ubuntu Touch - mobile OS thar is awesome and, I believe, is the future. So basically you can take any existing idea of an app for android/iOS and implement it there. That way you immediately have an infinity of new ideas. Same obviously goes for any new platform that you can build apps/projects for.