Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

Having created a few money making side projects here is some advice:

1. In my experience B2B ideas are best for quick monetization compared to B2C.

2. Think of roadblocks you face creating your own site. Pretty sure somebody else will face them too (many great products were created out of this, readme.io, statuspage, etc)

3. Don't go all in. I never spend more than 2 weeks before submitting my project on PH, HN, mailing my list. Don't ever make the mistake of working on something for 2 years alone not telling anyone about it.

4. Don't reinvent the wheel. Ie don't waste time on things like your login page (HNs login page is a great example on how much it matters), hiring designers (a template from HTML5rocks or wrapbootstrap is just as good). A lot of these things (support, auth, chat, etc) are offered as Saas services and can be integrated directly to save you weeks in launch.

5. Marketing is where you want to spend most of your time since yoh ask about making money. Also don't be afraid of pricing. Read patio11 black art of saas pricing for an excellent guide. Learn content marketing, SEO, etc.

Good luck!

Clarification: Don't reinvent the wheel means Don't exactly copy another product. It's damn important to reinvent defensible products that either, and hopefully do all of:

a) solve a slightly different problem

b) target different users

c) solve the problem in a 10x better, compelling way

Uniqueness will be added to the collective, so don't bother creating categories because that requires extra effort building validation from below zero and any new products coming along can execute much easier with the lessons and improvements of the "settlers."

I don’t believe that your clarification of the point you quoted is correct.

It sounds more as if the commenter wanted to point out that it is better to outsource/Saas chat, login, design and the likes to some external service instead of wasting time on it initially.

With that said - I believe you have a point in what you stated. A lot of products came out as a better copy of another product.

Great point. Let me rephrase this slightly to make it obvious that there is no contradiction between these two seemingly opposite pieces of advice. Do reinvent the wheel to solve your problems that you are then planning to sell to others. Do not reinvent the wheel to solve your problems that you are not planning to productize and for which you can easily get SaaS solutions. In other words, either create SaaS products, or use SaaS products. Don’t create one-off internal products that are not SaaS-able.

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