Side Project Ideas
The following list of side projects and startup ideas is an excerpt of my personal collection of ideas and business models. Over the years I kind of collected them like stamps 😉 They are categorized and outlined to be understandable. Most can be run alone or with a small team. If I know an example business I also listed that, because existing competition only prooves there is already a market for it… Feel free to send me more!
Categories include: Micro-SaaS, extend existing software with a missing functionality, automating manual tasks, finding inspiration from freuqent freelancing tasks, scratching our own itch, Plugin Economy, App Economy, Hosting X as a Service, Productized Services, etc.
Micro-SaaS / Software as a Service
Think of it like a big SaaS startup, but just very very simple, for small micro niche or just for a single-purpose solution. Fokus is on simplicity of the software and narrowing down the niche to be able to serve it as a solo founder or small team.
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Social Proof Plugin for Webshops (B2B)
A code snippet to be included into the checkout page of a web shop which shows the last few purchases in real time. Increasing the social proof and pressure to complete the purchase, which results in a higher conversion rate.
Example: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/proof-7 and a few more
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Yes, could be specialized to a certain kind of online shop (i.e. outdoor gear shops) or a certain geographic region (local language support) or a special platform (i.e. WP WooCommerce)
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Website & API Status tracker (B2B)
A simple web app which tracks online/offline status of REST Apis and Webservers. Could be a freemium with a monthly fee for premium features i think this exists a bazillion times already because its so simple and a lot of developers had this issue and “scratched their own itch”
Example: https://uptimerobot.com
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Could be catering a very special niche or offering special alerting features. Could alert about changes on a website (shop flash sales, offers of competition, etc.)
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Server-Security Watchdog (B2B)
A peace-of-mind tool for Sysadmins. Scans your website & servers for security vulnerabilities and gives alerts if anything suspicious is happening or if any vulnerability is detected. Also gives you updates on new patches on anything related to your stack.
Example: https://www.serverwat.ch/en
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Essentially this is a automated crawler which looks into special parameters, etc. It relieves the fear of missing something mission-critical and causing the business / webshop massive outages or losses. There might be other people who fear about a single point of failure in their business…
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Project Management Tool for “X” (B2B)
X probably exists for any category, like Freelancers, Web Agencies, Construction, etc. But is there a free niche or a bad / old product in one niche?
Example: https://tasman.io/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Definetly
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CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for “X” (B2B)
Needed by Sales & Marketing Manages. Stores and organizes all customer contacts and keeps the sales team up to date who to follow up, who to close, etc. There are dozens – but there might also be an niche which is not served yet? Every niche might have very special needs which are not matched with off the shelf CRM tools.
Example: Link is for “solar businesses” http://www.solarecrm.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Definetly, there must very vell be a CRM for every niche already. Think “dog trainers who specialize in disabled Labradors only”
Revive any old downloadable software / freeware as a SaaS or Website
Think about the freeware and sharware tools you downloded back in the 80ies/90ies with your cable modem. Well, if you are that old you might still remember 😉 And then re-invent that use-case as an easy to use web tool.
File format converter (B2C)
Enable your visitors to convert their source file (i.e. wav) into a desired target file type (i.e. mp3) easily by just uploading and downloading them.
Example: https://online-audio-converter.com
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Sure, just think about a specific customer base who might have special needs when converting any format to another or think about less-common file formats where there is fewer SEO competition.
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others, look for inspiration on shareware platforms …
Simplify the offer from big (SaaS) companies
Think about a big SaaS company and how they are beeing slow and bloated after a few years. They can not adapt anything quickly because the software is too big now and they are trying to cater everyone. You can compete by focussing on a very special niche or by improving a single feature by 10x.
Job board for XYZ (B2C / B2B)
The classic. The job market is so big and clustered that there are bazillion niches and also bazillion competitors who all kind of survive or thrive explosively. Don’t please everybody and try to compete with LinkedIn, Monster or other players but find a special approach and a special niche and focus on them.
Example:
- https://beincrypto.com/ (Crypto jobs only)
- https://nomadlist.com/ (People who wan to work from anywhere)
- http://www.remoteur.com/ Job Board for remote jobs in europe, again a very tiny niche (people in the EU who want to work remotely)
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Sure! Any job specialization and industry of course, and probably also adaptable to other marketplace types like “collecting old cars, stamps or lego toys”. Just go niche!
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Dropbox for Lawyers (B2B)
Having highly secure and certified file sharing might be important to a lawyer. Specializing on a certain industry makes it easier to keep the software simple and useful for some people and also market to those people easier.
Example: (?)
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: File sharing for any specific niche like wedding photographers, surf trainers, yoga teacher, etc.
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Evernote for Construction workers (B2B)
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Trello for Wedding planners
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Pipedrive for Vacuum cleaner salesmen
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you get the idea, just mix and match…
Extend existing software with a missing functionality
Think about an existing software or SaaS like a platform. What are the users of X missing in the software and what could be an extension to solve that need?
Archiving data from Google Search Console
The solution archives all historical data from SearchConsole as Google is only providing last 90 days . It helps to have long term tracking.
Example: https://www.sanitycheck.io/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Search for people who are complaining about restrictions or reporting limitations of existing software. This might be a niche to cater.
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Analytics for Amazon AWS (B2B)
Makes sense of the chaotic AWS Dasboards and brings analytics to one place
Example: https://www.s3stat.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Think about software solutions which are used broadly but lack a certain feature which might be needed by the admins, the marketers or the CEOs. Think about it this way: HTML is just another form of machine readable API
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Extended Comment Editor for Trello
Enables better note taking within a Trello card comment.
Example: http://adrienjoly.com/comment-editor-for-trello/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Who is using Trello and might have special needs? Who is using other common tools which could be improved by 10x if they would apply to their special use cases?
Automating manual tasks
Think about everything
Scheduled posting of Social Media Posts (B2B)
Schedule and plan your social posts, helps managing the Social Media profiles – there might be space for another tool for a new social network? There are currently a lot amongst “buffer” & Co. You might be a first-mover if there is another social network rising soon.
Example: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/publer
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Is there any special use case which is not taken on by the big players? A special niche with special needs? Or is there a new upcoming social channel which is not yet served?
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Private Website bookmarking (B2C)
Personal bookmarking as a paid service to guarantee no ads, privacy and simplicity of bookmarks.
Example: https://pinboard.in/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: The general theme could be “make something a paid service which is currently used by a lot of people but only available as advertising-based model & data-kraken models from google & Co.
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Find inspiration from freuqent freelancing tasks
Think and research: What are tasks which are regularily done by freelancers for a hourly rate. Go to upwork or fiverr and scan for regular appearing projects which could be done as a SaaS.
WordPress Pricing tables
Code and design for pricing tables as a fixed price product to save time for freelancers and agencies who otherwhise had to code it themselves.
Example: WordPress plugins “EasyPricingTables”
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: You could do any code module which is frequently used and offer it as a code-snippet or plugin for several plattforms or in different code bases. You may also find inspiration at https://codecanyon.net/
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Re-touching images for webshops
The customer can send a bunch of product images and receives every image re-touched and without the background. Just a plain white background. I think amazon requires the seller to have white-background product shots.
Example: https://www.freistellen.de
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: What special design tasks are frequently paid for? What target group might regularily need some designer to adapt a photo?
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Scratching our own itch
What are topics you are interested in privately / professionally where you would enjoy working on a solution (i.e. fishing catch diary, web security, rock climbing logbook, …)
Feature Request Voting Platform / Feature Forum (B2B)
For businesses who like their customers to “vote” on the feature pipeline but dont want to use Trello Customers can add features, upvote, comment, etc. Like StackOverflow or Trello but specifically for features. Also customers can be notified if feature is shipped, etc.
Example: https://www.userreport.com
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: What other businesses need to collect and prioritize feedback from their customers to react on it transparently? What businesses could benefit from a requesting platform?
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Goal Planning and habit tracking (B2C)
Be reminded of your goals and habits
Example: https://complice.co/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: What activites need regular repetition and reminders? What do you need to plan and track besides work tasks?
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UTM Url Builder (B2B)
Businesses with lot of incoming links and ad campaigns have a hard time tracking everything. The tool helps building and managing UTM Urls (for Analytics) if you want to track your traffic correctly
Example: https://www.terminusapp.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: What are small tasks which are done a bazillion times and could benefit from a simple but smart tool? Imagine a cashier without a cash register back in the days. Manually calculating dozends of products a day, it does not take much time but if you remove it it becomes a lot faster. Ask around in your network what do they do frequently with strange toolsets?
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Color Picker
A simple but nice and smart online tool to pick a color and find corresponding color sets.
Example: http://paletton.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: For designers and front end engineers this is regular work, but what decisions do other professions make daily? Do they still use books or book libraries for their lookup? Just imagining an architect trying to think of a solution for a specific room-arrangement. Do they play different options to find a solution?
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Social Media graphics without a designer (B2B)
A simple tool which helps you design beautiful images which you can use on social media. Also delivers every possible image size you might need for the social networks.
Example: Snappa https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/snappa or RelayThat https://relaythat.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Which are repetitive tasks who need a bit of special expertise but can be automated? I.e. there are also apps which create all the necessary app icons you need if you upload your app to the app stores (https://makeappicon.com/).
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Plugin Economy + Improving Hook-in-Platform Products (WordPress Plugins, Jira, Shopify, Salesforce, …)
Systematically go trough Platform directories (i.e. WordPress or Shopify or Jira) and look for heavily downloaded / rated plugins which look like crap or have lots of negative comments = there is a market but need improvement. The main idea is to piggiback on a bigger software and extend the functionality with an additional niche-use-case.
WP Plugin for affiliate marketing (B2B)
A WP plugin for affilate marketers who want to include offers and coupon codes on their sites with an easy to use tool and no individual coding.
Example: https://wpcoupons.io/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: You could either specialize on a specific niche which has special couponing needs or offer a similar service for other platforms like Shopify.
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WP Plugin for showing a map of store locations (B2B)
Businesses with multiple store locations need a plugin which includes a nice map of their store locations,
Example: Check the Story of “StoreMapper” on IH https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas-talk-b2b-rocks/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Which other businesses have special mapping-needs or special display needs of their specific offering (like cinemas, theaters, ice cream or food trucks, etc.)
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App Economy – Improving on existing smartphone app concepts
There are a lot apps which make a decent amount of money / downloads but are not longer supported or outdated, etc. Also there are lot of apps which have hit a market need but lack essential features and customers are not 100% happy.
Workout-Tracker for Yoga (B2C)
People who do Yoga might need a workout tracker smartphone app and probably there are a few solutions which lack important features.
Example: ?
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Any other specialized sport activity could have it’s own workout tracker. I’ve even seen trackers for rock climber training.
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App for live-quoting a potential customer (B2B)
For business who sell 1-on-1 on the customers location and do a lot of quotes might need an app which you can use to click trough to get a accurate quote based on the customer information you put in.
Examples: gardening, smaller construction, house services, funerals
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Might be adaptable for businesses where the buying decision is mostly it is done in the environment of the customer and the sale is closed pretty fast.
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Hosting X as a Service
Inspired by this interview on IH (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/arkservers-io) I like to think about what hosting services could be improved or what new open source tools need a hosting solution in the future
WordPress Hosting (B2B)
People who dont like maintaining their own webserver / security patches could buy a pre-defined WordPress hosting with automatic updates and security
Example: wpengine.com
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Host any kind of web site or CMS tool
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Gameserver Hosting for Game XYZ (B2C)
Gamer Teams / Clans who want to have their “own” server could just buy a fully managed game server.
Example: https://arkservers.io/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Any onlin game could be a potential “hosted” product
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Forum Hosting (B2C)
People who run communities but dont like to manage their own servers might need a managed forum software.
Example: https://www.proboards.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: In general a hosted communications platform. Slack is in a similar business. You could specialize the offer to a certain set of customers.
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Single page website hosting (B2B)
Businesses and people who want to have a website could just rent it from you. Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.
Example: https://themakingof.carrd.co/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: You could go into a specific niche like “musicians” or “dance performance groups”
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Boilerplate ready PHP app hosting (B2B)
Business or startups who quickly need a php environment for a new app
Example: https://spark.laravel.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: Is also already working for other common stacks, platforms and code bases like Ruby on Rails, etc.
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Productized Services
Simple Self-Service offers which are formerly done by freelancers. But for the customer it feels like a flatrate system where he can either buy a simple fixed price offer or a monthly flatrate model.
Design tasks flatrate (B2B)
The customer can request as many design tasks as he wants and receives the results within a certain timeframe. The monthly fee is all he needs to pay.
Example: https://www.manypixels.co
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: The design flatrate could be offered for more specifc customer groups like agencies and guarantee a extreme high quality result or a 8 hour turnaround time, etc. The content could also be specialized and only offer logo design or only offer app icon design.
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WordPress technical development and support flatrate (B2B)
For a monthly fee the customer can send any WordPress code fix or technical issue to the support team and get it fixed immediately.
Example: https://wpcurve.com/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: The same carefree support model can be offered for different kinds of platforms or even shop systems. The pain is they dont know how to fix things themselves and need a kind of insurance so everything runs smoothly.
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Podcast editing service (B2B)
For podcasters who have weekly or even daily shows its a hassle to cut and edit their raw footage. So this service offers to do the manual labor for a fixed monthly fee.
Example: http://cashflowpodcasting.com/podcast-editing-service/
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: You could specialize in video or audio only, or even in other kind of media formats.
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Content writing as a service (B2B)
For businesses who want to do content marketing but have few hours left to maintain a blog is a big hassle. With this service they can just outsource most of ther content creation to professionals. For a flat fee.
Example: audienceops.com
Adaptable to other markets / verticals: A niche specialization could be copywriting, social media post writing or whole ebooks for a fixed fee.
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And here are another 100 examples of productized services: http://jarhq.com/blog/100-productized-services-examples/
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More ideas and business models?
During the past years I have collected a whole bunch of business models and side project ideas for my own inspiration.
Soon I am sharing the whole list here.
Also I am writing an ebook on the side projects topic. I want it to be like an actual cookbook. Imagine it with ready-to-go reciepes of side projects and startup businesses. Including how to find your idea, what business model to use as a solopreneur or indie hacker, checklists where to promote and market your project, and many more topics. Turnkey reciepes for your successful side project…
If you want to receive all the additional ideas, business models + get free sample chapters as soon as they are ready, just sign up below…
Of course, you are free to move along on your own – you are a solo/indie founder after all – but those reciepes will definetly help you get your side project off the ground soon!
Best Regards
Patric
Other Resources:
– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5234692
– https://www.quora.com/What-web-products-should-be-built
– https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-51-coolest-side-projects-weve-ever-seen
– https://simpleprogrammer.com/guide-side-projects/
– https://open.buffer.com/getting-started-side-projects/
– https://dev.to/samjarman/finding-ideas-for-programming-side-projects
– https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-come-up-with-side-project-ideas-4a2c8049deba
– https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/