Ask HN: Recently laid off developer looking for solo product ideas
I'm an experienced (10+) fullstack developer who was recently laid off and find myself at an interesting crossroads. Rather than immediately jumping back into the job search, I'm considering this an opportunity to explore building something on my own or working on exciting ideas that could turn into meaningful products. I am looking for I ideas for solo products that could be built and launched relatively quickly and problems worth solving that don't require a large team initially. Also looking for opportunities to collaborate on interesting projects with other developers. Have you built successful solo products? What problems are you seeing in your day-to-day work that could use better solutions? Any advice for someone making this transition?
Join a hackathon that is focused on tech-for-good. For example, this one: https://www.fundingthecommons.io/hackathons Firstly, mentors and advisors will help shape your idea into something that meets real-world needs. And then, if you decide, you could go through their Residency to turn it into an ecosystem-weaved project.
If you want something real quick... Just help an open-source project.
In general, your challenge comes down to two questions: 1. How big an impact do you want to make? What is more important - impact or time spent? 2. Are you looking to build a product or a tool? Products require more time. Tools you can build faster, but still would need to maintain if you want it to be helpful.
Lately I've talked to so many people who are in a similar situation. Whether laid off or feeling stuck in the 9-5 grind, seasoned operators seem disillusioned with traditional employment in our industry.
I've heard this so often that I'm starting an incubator to bring these folks together to buy, operate, and grow existing profitable software businesses. No need to fumble around validating ideas or finding the first few customers, just focus on building and growing.
It's very early days, but I've put together a few thoughts[0] and am collecting feedback on the concept. Please feel free to reach out, my contact info is in my profile.
[0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...
My preferred method of finding something to build (assuming I don’t already have an idea I’m passionate about) is to pair up with someone who has deep industry knowledge in a non-tech industry (or any industry I’m not well versed in). Take their knowledge with your skill set to create a tool/platform/whatever for the given industry.
I find that vast majority of people, even top people in another field, don’t have a good grasp of what is possible with technology. I don’t say that to make them sound dumb, just they don’t know what they don’t know. You get to be the one who can suggest technologies they can use, either existing things you can glue together and/or custom code to help accomplish a task.
Good advice but I’ve spend my entire career trying to find those people. Never happened.
They're easy to find. Perhaps your use of my entire career is a tell? You find these people doing non-work/non-tech activities.
Activities clubs are beneficial for this. But surprisingly, attending my kids' school sports events is also awesome. I meet parents from diverse backgrounds, and we instantly have something in common (kids on the same team). I meet a lot of people all over the income spectrum.
I live in a rural area that is quite poor. Over the past couple of years, I've encountered about a dozen parents who look and dress normal, but are wealthy, and they're either in or they run interesting businesses.
They all have super interesting stories and perspectives and you realize a lot of people are successful because they've tried a ton of different things. They don't have high success rates, maybe ~10%, but they're consistent and they're persistent.
(I also talk to the poor parents and hear their stories. I have this weird thing where I try to introduce some of the harder working and ethical poor parents to the richer parents, where there may be some mutually-beneficial opportunities, when they'd otherwise be too adverse to introducing themselves.)
Build only when you have unfair competitive advantage with finding customers for your service.
no one would build anything by this logic
Except people who have an unfair competitive advantage with finding customers for their service.
The method I've been going with recently is to just clone an existing app. I was inspired by max rozen blogging about building the '200th uptime checker'. https://maxrozen.com/#bootstrapping-onlineornot
I've made a pdf bankstatement to csv app and now working on a session recording app.
The bank statement tool hovered around break even, but ultimately I shut it down since I hit a point where I was just grinding out integrations with different pdf bank statements, which got old, and had no end in sight.
How about a dating app for unattractive people? AI could block attractive people from registering.
genius
I have way more ideas than I have time to build. Maybe we should talk. What is your preferred stack?
Talk to people outside tech. Lots of small problems worth solving, but not in tech. Also, just because it's a problem in someone's day to day won't mean they'll pay to fix it.
Good luck!
"just because it's a problem in someone's day to day won't mean they'll pay to fix it."
The best way to measure is that they've hacked a solution themselves using inferior tools. This is where the 10x recommendation comes to mind - you can do it cheaper, faster, better.
what's your hobby in your office hours ?