Ask HN:Small ideas

The biggest advice I can give you is to forget the consumer market and create a B2B product. You only need 20 customers paying $50 a month to get $1000 a month revenue and be able to easily get a 20-50k exit. If you figure out a way to save a business $50 a month, or 1 developer man-hour a month, hitting that revenue target will be trivial.<p>I have done this numerous times with tools I had initially built for myself to automate a repetitive marketing task which I then spun out into subscription services and flipped for a 5 figure sum.

Look for a successful app you can copy. Then copy it.<p>I'm expecting downvotes for this comment, but it is the best advice I can give. You will learn tons in the process and the end app will likely be tailored in your vision. Something along the lines of this (jump to 4:43) <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgy4PcSpUkI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgy4PcSpUkI</a>

Yes, you can build something in a year that brings in $1,000 a month. BUT. Unless it's a problem that you, yourself, are having, I'm skeptical that you'll have the energy to see it through. Put another way: What annoyances do <i>you</i> have about your life? Where is the internet falling down on the job? Build that.

It's certainly possible; I've done better than that in less time. It took me about 4 months to get to beta. Six months before I launched and had recurring revenue. I worked nights and weekends to get it done but I also outsourced some of the less important work.<p>I'm about 8 months past that point now and I'm extremely glad I took the route that I did. It wasn't easy getting here but totally worth the effort.

Yesterday my colleagues discovered a "Paul the Kraken" app in some app store. Paul is the octopus that correctly predicted the outcomes of all soccer games of the German team in the world cup. The app sold for 0.79€<p>Now I don't know if it makes any money, but it sounds like something you could throw together in an afternoon (essentially, a random number generator with 50% for yes and no respectively).<p>Maybe the same thing could be repeated over and over with the current news story of the day. Oil spill? Make an oil spill app (whatever, blackens the screen of the phone or something more fancy like the google maps overlay that was posted on HN).

Do you mean 6 and 8 hrs per day, or 6 hours over the course of the week and 8 hrs over the course of the weekend? Because if you meant the first, (1) I am skeptical that you have 6 hours of good work in you in addition to your regular job, unless maybe your job isn't coding at all and you live alone and you don't actually like to see humans, and (2) that's 46 hours per week! I sure hope you could build something worth $1000/month after a year of that--and after 4 years of $1000/month you'll have earned $20/hr on your original work.

I wonder if new companies have to check their proposed logos against existing trademarked logos to make sure they don't infringe? If so my idea for you is to build a way for companies to upload their proposed logo and have a search done to find existing similar logos.

I'm not sure if this helps but if you're considering a subscription system I put this spreadsheet together in Google Docs so you can see how many subscribers at each tier you need and what your costs will be:<p><a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AumfOxrn5FGtdEN5U21LTks4QzFnTHBNZDhCaThZSHc&#38;hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AumfOxrn5FGtdEN5U21L...</a>

I am in the same boat. I look for ideas that aren't difficult to implement. That way I can easily build it in evening hours. I have found that marketing and sales takes the vast majority of the time anyway.

I've actually got a few ideas - 3 in the top priority list - that I'm hoping to have developed in the near future if the OP or anybody is willing to partner. I'm situated in South Africa, where there are a wide variety of market gaps ITO technical implementation. The country is market ready with 120% sim penetration and 52% internet access growth in the last few years (about 10m of 45m total).<p>The benefit would be dual-market penetration, here and in the US. The only downside would be time-difference (7 hours if you're in EST) and we'd have to communicate via Skype. Seeing as the OP wants to achieve $1000 monthly revenue, that means that by current exchange rates, about R8000 local revenue would be the target (If focusing solely on the SA market) which is very feasible ITO a somewhat simple B2B tech product.<p>Email is brand [dot] magnate {at} g mail {dot} etc. Use Hacker news as subject.<p>tl;dr - I'm a commerce grad/ start-up owner in South Africa with a few ideas willing to share a good portion of equity with a CTO.

Contracting would make that much money for those hours.

The best advice that I learned from one of my advisors: look for a medium/big idea that's relatively easy to implement. There are plenty of those in B2B sector.<p>Why? Because it's as hard to get small amounts of money as it's to get medium amounts of money. And even relatively easy things can reveal interesting (and nasty) problems when you dive into them.<p>If you don't have any insights what kind of problems companies have, do a couple of gigs for money and start to thing a product based on those.

Pick the simplest idea and implement it in one month.<p>Sometimes what you think might be cool can turn out to be boring, but only after you have wasted a year on it.

I'd recommend doing something along the lines of: <a href="http://www.dollarapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dollarapp.com/</a><p>the principle is quite easy: 1guy develops an iphone application during 1month and sells it for $1. He invests all the revenue in the next app to make it somewhat more fancy/advanced ...

I've seen many of these posts asking about "ideas that will generate x money" coming up lately. While it is certainly possible to make $1000 per month after a year of development, I'm not sure how likely it is.<p>Product development is risky. Certainly, you can use strategies like developing a "minimum viable product" to mitigate some of the risk, but even doing that can be a lot of work. So unless you are willing to take the risk that you'll spend a year of your time, and not have any revenue generating product, I wouldn't head down this path.

Yes. We created the first version of Freckle in &#60;260 man hours and it earned $2k+ a mo with no real promotion.<p>What il said - do something that serves people who make money off it. That's the way business is done.

First, do some research, which I suppose this is what you are doing by asking HN. Second, come up with loads of ideas, then decide which ideas you prefer most and try out some of them, like not fully implement them, but just sample them, then, see which works best.<p>Trial and error. It works every time :)