e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/
I believe that every village needs to solve their own problem and and may be in a different way(based upon the resources they have) as the external help may not arrive. The solution also need not go to cities as it is very specific to the village. This man got a project working after passing the initial inertia. His company may not scale beyond a certain limit but I guess that's okay.
What do you think would be those kind of ideas?
I've been designing and building audio software and hardware components for musicians since I was a teenager. VST plugins to start, then moved on to digital guitar effects and now Eurorack synth modules. I've also built custom midi controllers, traditional guitar pedals, you name it, I've designed and built it.
I have absolutely no doubt that I could build a small, semi-successful company around these products, that would turn over 200-300k per year, with a nice profit margin. In fact, I've made quite detailed business models which make me very confident in that.
My problem, however, is that I am extremely well employed (like probably many other readers here :) and that just won't compete with my current paycheck; which also comes with job security, low stress, and vacation days (I'm on the UK). These ideas would also be very difficult or impossible to grow into million dollar+ annual sales, as they are targeted at very niche audiences.
So I've been stuck in this half-way place, where I have a bunch of products, mostly finished, even polished (and I work on this stuff because I LOVE doing it, that's the only reason), and every time I have to make a decision whether to open source it and give it away or try to monetise it. So far, it's all gone the open source way, but I have a couple of projects I'm holding back because I think I might be able to sell them to another company for a decent amount.
Thinking about all those meta/alphabet/twitter employees being let go these days, I wouldn't be surprised if we're about to see an explosion in cool, scrappy tech startups, from people who've been in my situation, and decided to use this as an opportunity to build their little dream startup - I hope so!
As long as you're not unhappy with your day job, that's great. If you are unhappy, then you have a passion project/domain that you already have good progress in.
It's easy to give advice, so I'll give some. Make a 6 month plan toward quitting your day job (reducing financial burdens, winding down unnecessary expenses, generally preparing for no income). Make some potential plans for how you might fill your days with regard to your audio work. If you don't do this step, you may find yourself feeling lost or aimless and consequently not as happy as you would have expected.
But here's the best part, I think: start using some of your free time to go to conferences and shows where audio tech is a feature. Show some of your stuff, or at least talk to others about it. Where this could lead is vast and somewhat unpredictable, but it might be a lot of fun and it likely could lead to something solid.
Meanwhile, focus on one or two of your projects and try to get them polished enough to setup a storefront and promote (assuming you're not already doing this).
Maybe it never reaches your current job income, but it might get close enough that you decide it was worth it. And if not, there will always be more jobs waiting.
Now I think I do:
1. Those engineers will less likely to upend the apple cart by inventing something that could disrupt business 2. Those engineers will be kept away from competition, where they could do something to help competition
Those tech workers are sufficiently happy that leaving is typically not an optimal choice.
FWIW, I am just typing aloud. So please correct me if you see a flaw in that reasoning.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-ceo-unve...
However ... getting deep into DSP is another thing!
Don't you think this will give people like you (especially those not well connected) more granular insight to take the decisions they are hesitant about?
Personally. I'm just curious. I've been using VSTs for 20 years, and I find this power fascinating. So, I'm intrigued by all the human and market dynamics behind the scenes that make it possible.
Sadly, in our current system, less economic growth = less money is given to musicians = less money musicians give to tool creators. This may not even be a linear chain, so the effect get a whole worse at the end point (if you know what I mean)
There's a little bit of this on the Valhalla blog[1] IIRC (great reading if you're into DSP tech). You might also find pieces of insight by looking at some of the hackaday posts or by looking at some of the DIY Synth groups on facebook etc. There's definitely some interesting stories there of Kickstarters that over-promise and under-deliver (late/buggy/etc), ISLA Kordbot[2] springs to mind as an example that was a long wait, as well as some darlings like the Oxi One[3]. Perhaps reading Kickstarter comments and the associated forum posts could be a viable strategy for getting more into this field.
[1]: https://valhalladsp.com/blog/
Same thing with medical tech, energy tech, etc.
Web and to some extent games are a lot more open (and larger) than most fields
My startup on which we poured 3 years of work by 10 people, failed to ever earn back the money spent on it.
I think you are underestimating how hard it is to sell and how fleeting can success be.
Once you've got the structure and interface right, start customizing according to requirements. Does a rural area run on delivered kerosene and propane? Schedule deliveries to customers according to the local temperatures and a per-client adjustment reflecting their historical usage.
Most of all, make it easy and obvious for your clients to use every day. Talk to them about their professional networks -- is there a forum or a mailing list where they discuss the business side? Get mentioned, get recommended. Be easy to talk to.
Huh, I basically just spent my entire week working on this for our bakery (and the last 6 months on other software and systems like recipe management, team messaging, online sales, social marketing and more). We're using Odoo which has a lot of the pieces already there, I need need to write a few custom modules to link them up and make them bakery specific.
While I've been doing this, I've been thinking about how most small businesses couldn't do this. Partly technical know-how. But on a deeper level, they wouldn't even think about it, because a lot of people who run small businesses like bakeries are not technical and don't want to be and they can't afford to hire someone who is. And I've been wondering how to solve that problem - or if I'd want to, because as you say, it's not a million dollar idea. But it is an empowering idea for small businesses everywhere.
If anybody non-technical is interested in partnering with me (technical) on this, my forwarding email's in my profile.
It could be that efficiency -- usually oven space or mixer capacity -- causes them to make it in lots of, say, 50 loaves. If they make one lot and sell out, they make two lots -- but if the second lot doesn't sell out, they go back to making one lot a day. Better to be in demand than taking a loss on unsold product.
What’s this alluding to?
Out of interest, what makes you think there's still money left on the table in this domain, given all the existing products? Or rather, what do you feel all the existing products lack?
In any given city there may be lots of dry cleaners available. Some will be much better than others (service, performance, etc.). Some will be much cheaper than others. Some may be the perfect combination of all these things.
Unfortunately, we often don't know where the best one is. And perhaps because of another person's suggestion "affiliate marketing", it is now virtually impossible to search online to get actual reviews of things (as there are now more SEO-d review sites which are just thinly veiled affiliate marketing sites).
So we use the service we see nearby or stumble upon. It may not be the best, but we don't really know better.
The same applies to so many things in life, business or otherwise (people, friends, relationships). Thus, yet-another-monitoring-service can succeed if it gets enough customers, even if there are much better services out there.
There's always underserved customers that are somehow dissatisfied.
There are definitely companies with toxic high-stress engineering environments, but workers with valued skills have the employment capital to just… opt out. If all you care about is coasting at an average salary, you can either refuse to engage with the stressful parts of the job, or get another job. You get fired? Oh well, on to the next job.
I’ve worked in jobs where I had stressed co-workers who felt like the future of the company was on their shoulders… and co-workers, on the same team, who didn’t have a care in the world, because they understood that the success of the company was not linked to how stressed they were or how many hours they worked. Their value to the company was equal, their quality of life was vastly different.
If all you want is $100k/year, and you have the skill set to build your own company, you have the skill set to get a job where you don’t have to break a sweat. There are lots of companies out there who know how to realise >$100k value from an employee in 30 hours of low-stress work per week.
The whole notion of needing a career is self imposed, it’s a choice, if you’re happy making an average salary you don’t need to be in a high stress environment.
I once had such a job and it was horrible: I worked as an amazon warehouse associate, basically just receiving packages, sorting items, putting a barcode with asin on it, done. Loop this for 8 hours plus some additional pressure from team leads.
In the evening I didn’t even have the energy left to have any kind of “life“; and I really hated that job, so it was even more exhausting and tiring.
Now I have a job which really fulfills me, and I don’t even see it as work anymore. I have no issue with staying late, and I actually want to stay late often in order to get my stuff done; also still working at home and researching stuff in my free time. But now I don’t really have this clear border what some call work-life balance.
My opinion might not be agreeable for everyone, but maybe this viewpoint helps someone else.
Above $1B, you can’t avoid having your name in the press, so that may increase stress on both you and your family.
But when having to choose between 100k and keeping your head down and 100k and keeping your head high, I know what I would choose. Of course the latter comes with more initial stress and risk so you have to know what you want.
Running your own business is stressful. It requires a level of organization apart from the skills you need to make a viable and successful product. It is not a common combination.
I guess I would not automatically equate "keeping head up high" = running your own business. I assure you even when you run your own business, you have people to answer to.
There are currently 200 founders making $1.6M per month with their solo startups.
But also, you can read Q&A-s with the founders about how they started, got their first customers, etc.
I’m not singling you out, since this happens allllllll the time, but I truly wish you or anyone could articulate why you thought it would be helpful to share something that was by definition unhelpful or “off topic”.
Truly breaks my brain trying to fathom this behavior.
How do they even know it’s a problem if they have no idea that it can be solved, i.e. that life without that problem is even thinkable?
It’s a bit like Ford’s saying that, if you had asked customers what they want, they’d said they want a faster horse.
In an ideal world, i would love to walk you to random people in the street, invite them to have a coffee with me, and let them tell me about their life and their work. And i am sure that, eventually, in pretty much all of those conversations, I’d find something I can help them with.
Do you see a better way?
If I dropped you off in some city, and you’d have to find ten high value business ideas merely from talking to strangers about their real world needs, how would you do it?
Or, if anyone here has done it in actuality, how did you do it?
Thanks.
Probably, but state laws (varying from bad to worse) make alcohol distribution one of the more heavily regulated things you could try to "fix".
I think it's something just about anyone can do as it doesn't require special training.
Finding reliable, motivated employees who will work for you and not themselves is the challenge that makes this type of business exceptionally hard to scale, from what I’ve been told.
And google “maid/lawn service <city>” for your city and adjacent ones and you might find people using that playbook.
Scan a qr code, get in line. Or via a url or app.
Sounds simple enough, useful enough. Friends easily pointed out issues with how this could go wrong and with very little extra time after work, I dropped it.
Comments on this thread just stirred it all up.
You get 10min, 5min push notifications, then if you aren’t in the store within 1 min of your spot in line being called, you forfeit the X cents. But if you are then they give you a discount on whatever your buy so the “line charge” nets out.
However, I’m not sure if there exists an X such that A) you’ll risk it for the convenience but B) it’s enough to actually compensate the store if you don’t go
(Could be some interesting behavioral econ approaches there, maybe?)
Fun to think about, thanks for sharing!
More like, the company is willing to pay more but won't do so until the worker asks for a raise, in my personal experience.
If you're talking web agencies or subcontractors, that make more sense, as the client is paying for the waste, regardless.
Seems like the perfect job for a entrepreneurial student or retiree. Would be hard to scale though unless you built up a crew of people doing it.
A website where you can print aftermarket gaskets on demand, and even do it with CAD files or derive them from edge detection in photos would make its money by shipping faster than OEMs, and without worrying about inventory. Retooling an existing custom sticker printing business would do it. Unit margins are like 100x the cost of the paper, and shipping cost margin is the other one.
One the fulfilment side, gaskets can be laser cut, and there are services which offer this on demand. Batching up multiple orders into a sheet would make it more cost efficient, along with always printing Nx the required amount and then stock the rest.
more of a socio-economic observation but it's a problem that needs solving for each village - the current solution is government subsidy from urban areas to pay for care workers and pharmacy to drive around all day in the countryside to see people for a few mins each
I'm thinking if each rich old person in the village paid a subscription for a dedicated local care team who lived together in a nice house in the village (like 30x people paying £1000 a month to support 5 people) then that would be a balance for a very decent care wage + consistent high quality care
I think it could be as simple as a few standardised processes and contracts. If a village wants to try it they follow the steps and set it up themselves
Now, if I had a $1B to disrupt that industry with some Uber model…
I think there's a lot of small-medium sized websites that fall into such a category.
That would be P/S (price to sales), not P/E (price to earnings/profits). Not sure about web stuff, but for other small businesses no one would pay anywhere close to 10x P/S (or P/E for that matter but profits are more valuable than revenue).
- https://words.hk - if you haven't heard of this yet, probably because the site is in Cantonese (yeah, this is a novel thing, a Cantonese-Cantonese dictionary...)
- https://cantowords.com - This is an English version recently launched this year. The page rank or whatever SEO thing isn't up to speed yet, so there's not a lot of page views for this one yet.
For example, "when I get in the car and it is after 6pm but before 9pm and the car is headed west on the 401, text my wife that I just got on the highway and I'm headed home."
Charge $8k per month. Someone will take you up on it.
Imagine lifestyle subscriptions. You have an app that is a digital catalogue where you type in your salary and then it tells you what packages you can buy with your salary.
Think of it as a life personal trainer and adviser with a shop attached.
* Coffee at Starbucks every other morning on way to work
* Gym once a week
* You could get a job at these companies if you tried.
* I drink coca cola or Pepsi with my pizza
* I drive a Prius and I want a max 1 hour drive
* Move to X neighbourhood
* I am a vegan or I am vegetarian
* I cook at home
* I go to a restaurant once a month
* I subscribe to Netflix only
* I am learning to play the piano. Here's the address of the place you can learn and practice.
Use recommendation algorithm and futures to reserve restaurant tables.
Allow user generated curriculum to get your desired lifestyle.
Integrate with calendar and meetup.com
It's a one stop shop for following any dream
Schedule your life to work towards a goal
They would know how to produce good results from people subscribing to be musicians or vegans for successful outcomes. They could send you instruments or food parcels. They would schedule your week socially and free time. Watch this show.
They would be measurers.
They would be marketing experts.
The goal is to sell someone a dream and to live the dream.
I own a handful of profitable small online businesses and I’m building another in my spare time. You can tell by my user name where a lot of opportunity for small time programmers are (crypto in general really) but HN is ideologically opposed to that industry despite the profit opportunities being massive.
And finally I don’t want to reveal any here because I believe Peter Thiel when he writes that “every business has a secret”. On the surface level they are selling XYZ but the reason they win in a competitive market is only known to those running it.
https://unvalidatedideas.com/archive
The only problem is I can't tell you which ones are the 100k ones...
I've got a hunch that this one is solidly 100k and not million+:
https://unvalidatedideas.com/editions/11
Got all the hallmarks of an idea that is hard to profit/scale:
- selling to developers
- content-based (so often very manual at the beginning)
- absolutely boring (to some people) niche
[EDIT] - wait no I could see this one possibly getting big, if you strike the right "compliance and security posture" tone.
I suspect it is easier to think of it in time invested and returned: if you invest a year of time at a 10x risk, you need to get 10 years of early retirement to cover that risk. That is easier to back-calculate how much you need to bank to reward your risk - 10 years of after tax income is a huge figure for most people (far far more than your $100k).
VCs target 30-times return for each individual investment to cover their risk, and they spread their risks over multiple investments. You usually have only one concentrated investment, so a sensible target profit for yourself alone could easily be $10 million if you have high earnings, and the revenue target is probably much much higher than that (depending on profit margin, and dilution, etcetera).
There are a few mitigations that could lower the multiplier. I regarded starting a business as university-of-practicality, so I also valued learning. I had also said no to previous valuable opportunities in my past, so I knew the regret and opportunity cost of saying no. If you can do something on the side and slowly ramp up the proof-of-profitability, you can dramatically reduce risk and so far lower profitability is needed (but beware of the slow ugly death at one_second_per_second of time wasted on a failing business). Many people value autonomy highly (although beware that it is common to make clients your boss, and end up with a lack of autonomy in your own business).
Background: I founded a business over a decade ago that has let me semi-retire, however in hindsight I am still unsure it was worthwhile, because there are other serious costs and risks beyond my time investment.
Bear Blog (https://bearblog.dev) JustSketchMe (https://justsketch.me)
Both are profitable enough to keep me quite comfortable while being niche enough to not appeal to any company with VC funding.
This will remain small because the profitable real estate is locked but it could be an option for the remaining small venues.
Do you know of a good site that focuses on browser extension reviews and discussions? I now realize I could probably find things which would improve my life, but I don't feel like doing a random walk through the general extension page of Firefox.
And in the IT space, your competition is companies like Lockheed Martin... Although you might have a leg up if your company is veteran-, woman-, or minority owned, see Offices of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization.
The target markets haven't increased in size, unless you're in developing countries with upwardly mobile populations.
So more affiliate marketers just means more duplication of noise, with everyone gaming ways to get the same business (or direct the same business to your companies).
If I have to watch another NordVPN ad baked into a youtube video, ...
Is mostly about making orders/invoices for small companies.
A LOT of people are like me that work in this space that you never heard of. Doing the "same" kind of apps that have a bigger brand but because we serve locally can do a better job there.
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Other option is open source. I think https://tablam.org could become an Access/excel option for my customers for the same reasons.
Open source itself is not very profitable (heck, I love to work more on TablaM than my ecommerce app but that one is what bring food).
I believe that coming up with product ideas that can work at the indie level (bootstrapped/without raising millions) is a matter of training, validating the idea is the hardest part (and not falling into the trap of building it first). The main target of those ideas is often something that can sustain you with under a hundred customers, which rules out building a new social network.
One idea I had recently is on the edge of consumers and businesses: it might make sense to have groupon-like websites for niches. These could be geographical, or around a certain activity. For instance if you are into craft beer, why not create a "deal" website for it? Call up shops that sell brewing equipment, walk in to local bars and ask if they would like to come up with some craft beer tasting event. The model is here that you get a kickback if people take you up on your offers. The more niche the better.. It could be as specific as "young parents who love craft beer and live in New York". That sounds like it could be in the 100k range.
A small plug, for fun I've been writing up some ideas that fit this description [0].
Paying $8 for Twitter Blue
And look at https://tinyprojects.dev/projects, it has some 100k ideas (imho).
I am the creator of 2bored2wait [0], a proxy that does stuff that is useful if you are a regular player on the minecraft server 2b2t.org. the current implementation is buggy, slow, in javascript and has a lot of tech debt.
An interesting fact about 2b2t is that because it is an anarchy server, it has not rules against using cheats and players won't get banned for using them. This means that there is a subset of players with too much money that likes to spend it on some flavor of paid hacked clients, some with monthly subscription.
I think there is a business somewhere to rewrite 2bored2wait in a faster language, integrate it well in a hacked client and/or as a service and sell that for a monthly fee or whatever, but i haven't even had the drive to do it for the sake of open source, even less so for creating a saas product that at most 100 people would use.
* Architecture - Most people writing code cannot plan, write, or envision an original solution to something wildly ambitious. This takes practice and with enough practice it gets comfortable and easy, but most people writing code will never get to that point. A mastery of architecture is possibly the only way to produce a superior product compared to the competition provided that business requirements remain unchanged.
* Performance - Astonishingly most people never measure anything unless they are forced to. Learning to measure things (everything) is a cognitive skill and the result is the difference between a 2 hour work day and an 8 hour work day. Measuring things is also the only way to write fast software, because everything else is guessing (and probably guessing wrong by several orders of magnitude). At the end of the day performance is not about how fast something this, but how much faster it is than something else.
* Writing, especially bridging the gap between technical writing and narrative writing for common people.
It's the kind where it's so common you think of one every day.
It's also not that much, 100K USD has never been lower in value, so that trend is moving in your favor too.
That's why they say ideas like this are worthless, but they're wrong.
In perspective, though, when a company pays somebody 50K it really costs the company about 100K anyway, and there are companies all over the place where that's what they pay people who are not expected to produce anything at all. We all know how many bullshit jobs there really are.
So there's lots of people every day who have ideas more wortwhile than their actual job.
Every once in a while it's a million dollar idea but it can be kind of hard to tell and usually slips under the radar.
Since it requires a different type of action to get the ball rolling either way, 10X remains just as far out-of-reach as an uneconomical venture.
Now the 100K amount is a good example benchmark, but you can also think about things like 250K etc.
Launching boats as a service. I pick up your boat, launch it and all you have to do is get in. Comes with a matching extraction and cleaning service.
Online dating management service. Have a process takes photos, creates the profile and then a recurring subscription to have a person do messaging for you and arrange dates. Hire college gals to generate the initial leads.
A service to tack all the local kids classes and events, keep track of sign up dates and such. Have a super premium service that signs people up automatically when the spots open.
Extra Garbage pickup as a service. While everyone is required to have basic garbage service you can easily undercut the garbage company for anything non standard or extra.
Rental service for high quality tools. Let people rent festool, sawstop, and other high end items.
Your question implies you are looking for tech ideas and your skills are in building software or services. The other side is applying high tech to areas of business that aren't very high tech at the moment - think about all the small or local businesses that still thrive that can barely get a website together and couldn't afford to hire a decent developer or even have the skills to manage a software project - if tech can improve that business you can differentiate yourself.
Otherwise, if you hit by a bus (as the saying goes) you're screwed. Worse, your customers are left for dead. It's the morals / ethics of the latter that make such a size tough.
You want a size that can support two or three total employees. If you're going to serve customers you want some redundancy. Sure, others don't take such precautions, but that doesn't make it right.
Every million dollar idea is a 100K dollar idea.
There are always smaller segments within large segments that you can go after.
now i thought 'selfdriving refrigiators' maybe a thing, and yes (with few thousand paying customers a month) it may scale to a million-dollar bizz... ^^
Start with a billion dollar one. :-)
