HACKER Q&A
📣 cpufry

What Should I Build?


I've got several years of experience working for two public clouds and building core services in the containers/compute space.

I'd like to eventually build something in this space (side project that I can grow into something that will pay the bills someday) but I can never come up with ideas for side projects.

Anyone have suggestions for projects I can build?

Alternatively - What's the best way to get exposed to customer problems in this space? I honestly do not know.

  👤 hamza__nouali Accepted Answer ✓
I can't tell you what to build, but I can help you my own experience.

How to find product ideas?

Good to know:

You can't come up with a 100% original idea.

Take inspiration from other products and fix the bad things in them:

- UI/UX

- Add or reduce features.

- Change the target customer.

How to find products to copy?

1) Marketplaces:

Go to Envato, Chrome store, AppSumo, App Store, etc and find products with a lot of downloads but a low rating.

Read the reviews carefully and extract the pain points.

2) Stories:

You can find problems, ideas, and markets by reading other product stories.

3) PH, IH, HN, Betalist, etc:

If you are looking for product ideas, make sure to follow these websites:

- Product Hunt.

- Hacker News.

- IndieHackers.

- Beta list.

4) Freelancing:

Working as a freelancer will let you know people's needs and their pain points.

- You can find some tasks that can be easily automated.

- Softwares they are using.

- Plugins ideas.

What if you don't want to work as a freelancer?

5) Spy on freelancers:

Browsing Upwork, Guru, Fiverr, etc will let you know what businesses are looking for.

It's a great way to find tasks that can be automated.

👤 emteycz
My approach is to build a few end user apps. Silly things or something that will make the life easier for my parents, for example - recently I made a self-hosted family photo gallery with backup to cloud. This way, you can see the problems of building apps, and that could give you new ideas for your core platform services - it certainly gives me ideas.