Ask HN: Recently laid off developer looking for solo product ideas
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Good luck!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...