HACKER Q&A
📣 thatgloomyguy

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?

  👤 georgestrakhov Accepted Answer ✓
I have way more ideas than I have time to build. Maybe we should talk. What is your preferred stack?
👤 CER10TY
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!

👤 haute_cuisine
Build only when you have unfair competitive advantage with finding customers for your service.
👤 joshstrange
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.

👤 bilsbie
How about a dating app for unattractive people? AI could block attractive people from registering.
👤 remyp
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 dissilusioned 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 and am collecting feedback on the concept[0]. Please feel free to reach out, my contact info is in my profile.

[0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...

👤 takkatakka
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.