Ask HN: How to find a niche for a side project?
Hi everyone.
I have been thinking of building a fintech product for traders. But I am open to being pointed towards other ideas.
It doesn't have to be much. 12k per year from 1,200 customers paying $10 per year would do it for me. I live in a "third world" country and 12k per year can afford me a comfortable though minimal life.
So my questions for any successful solo devs reading this are;
a) How did you find your niche?
b) What niche should I be looking at?
c) What open problems are out there that a solo dev can work on?
d) Is it okay to share your product? if so please do, it may help inspire me with my own ideas.
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A) Everybody is now talking about decentralization. I started my decentralization solution a year before decentralization became a buzzword. The original app was an unrelated personal application but then I need a way to distribute the resources the application made available and I needed extreme privacy, such as not using a server. So I wrote a data model and transmission scheme to solve for this.
B) Do what you find interesting. If it’s original nobody is going to use it (at least at first) but if it’s not original body will care.
C) Many. If you can’t find one yourself go into consulting and innovate business processes.
D) .
A lot of good comments/ ideas here. @altdataseller has a valid objection.
However, if you have 3-4 yrs experience in Fintech then maybe you know the pain points of some specific people that are successful day traders and can provide a solution for them, getting a cut of the improvements you provide OR someother negotiated deal. Obviously that requirs trust. In this case start very small, maybe even free and work your way up as a tech partner. In all cases, do research, start amall, dont be afraid to cut loses. Good luck.
Common advice is to find where two of your interests or talents cross. Programming is one here, so now just build something that's useful in another of your hobbies or interests.
Another idea is just cloning an existing idea. I think there are probably many niches where it would be relatively easy to build the best product, and other niches where the number of customers is so large that it's not too difficult to capture a small part of the market, even if it's saturated. 12k/yr is a tiny amount of revenue.
Read the reviews of some apps that work like the one you could make, take notes of the features users are most happy with, but also take special attention to the pain points. What are people requesting that the developers haven't done yet? Reviews are a great research tool. Summarize these killer features users want, and build your app from there.
“12k per year from 1,200 customers paying $10 per year would do it for me”
Unfortunately that is a lot. Getting 1200 customers to pay you any amount requires enormous amounts of marketing, whether its paid or acquiring an audience.