[encoderer]

If you aspire to run an indie software business like this, you might want to take note of how absolutely boring most of the success in this space is.

Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring. These businesses (the cron one is mine) are all doing great, making millions. But in this space the vast majority of devs are chasing fun and cool projects in web3 and AI that are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems.

Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems. If you’re doing something too interesting there’s a good chance you’re just playing around

[dottedmag]

How to find these boring problems? Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution, so I'm discouraged to even try to make something, as I know that okayish solution will be even better when I get mine to work.

[gumballindie]

> Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution

Congratulations. It means your ideas are good and there is a proven market for them (assuming the solutions you find are generating revenue).

The fallacy that “there already is a product” out there doing something and as such you shouldnt would imply that we’d all wear identically looking jeans and there would be one car design and one type of phone.

Differentiate a bit. The only questions to answer are: can you execute on your idea, is there a market large enough to achieve your target revenue and is it overcrowded?

[davnicwil]

Even 'differentiate a bit' might be the same instinct biting.

Really, just market and sell adequately enough to grab the share of the market that you need is all it comes down to. Your product might even be a worse copy of an established competitor and this still holds true.

It's so rarely about more or different features, better UX, or innovative twists on ideas, and so often about just getting in front of the customer in the right place at the right time.

[maxilevi]

How do you find out if it’s overcrowded or not? Supposedly with a good enough differentiator it doesn’t really matter if it’s overcrowded right?

[wongarsu]

Talk to the people who have the problem you are solving (or the people making purchasing decisions for those people). Do they know about the existing solutions? Do they use any? Would they be willing to switch? Have they switched in the past?

[encoderer]

Riffing..

Take one of those ideas. Make a site that reviews all the current competitors in the market.

Put the one with the best existing seo strategy in first place.

Contact them and let them know and ask that they link to it, offer to write a guest blog post about how you reviewed every tool in the space and this one came out on top, and why.

Share the site all over where you can find people talking about the niche.

if the niche is not too big, this will often get you ranking for that term. Google loves “best ___ in 2023” content.

You are building a traffic source.

Then you can build a product and put your product in 1st place or even above the list entirely. Write a blog post about how you took the best of the other tool you reviewed and created the perfect tool for <certain persona>.

Ok, end riff, i have no idea if that will work but it seems repeatable and not too difficult. It really is all about getting traffic.

[tiffanyh]

Just for clarity, is the product you build in the same category as the products you initially reviewed?

[marcopicentini]

If you want an idea: A SaaS to host product guides with good i18n.

- Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.

[hoofhearted]

I’m working on something now that solves just this.

I had to build out a Next app last year with a seamless looking blog and docs site. I struggled to find real solutions, so I ended up getting in touch with Marco from Plausible to get some advice. He helped me to figure out their stack, and I replicated it to my project. I released a dope next app with a markdown powered blog and docs site that looked amazing.

I’m working on releasing a free cli tool for frontend devs based off this work. I’d love some feedback and watches on GitHub if anyone is interested. Link is in my bio.

SHOW HN and IH coming soon :)

[rambambram]

For your interest, I clicked through to your website from Github and it gave me a 'site not secure' prompt from my browser (desktop Firefox).

[hoofhearted]

Thank you for checking it out! Much appreciated.

Yeah, I have a few hypothesis that I am going to prove using the Elegant tool that I’m working on.

The first hypothesis is that I’m going to use Elegant itself to scaffold out the documentation. So when the domain is live, Elegant will be ready for beta testing. I hope to get some content up on the domain this week!

Thanks for pointing this out.

[hoofhearted]

How about now? Is it still saying it’s not secure?

[marcopicentini]

Please let me know if you have a beta or link so we can test it as soon is live.

[hoofhearted]

Hey Marco, check out the MVP that I launched! Could I get some feedback?

[marcopicentini]

I would created as a Saas with: - multi language. Default translated using deepL and then a translator can check and review using a WYSIWYG editor. - alternative html SEO tag for Google. - Tailwind syntax template

[SamyPesse]

GitBook founder here :)

We are working on multiple aspects of the products that should cover a lot of this (improved i18n, SEO, faster rendering)!

Would love to get your feedback on what you would like to see improved exactly on our SEO friendliness and i18n support. We have an open GitHub community for feedback; https://github.com/GitbookIO/community/discussions

And for anyone, if you are interested in building a "A SaaS to host product guides ", we are hiring engineers/designers/builders: https://jobs.gitbook.com/ :)

[marcopicentini]

It's been 2 years that I suggest to implement i18n. Or at least let add a JS snipped to use WeglotJS

[stuartjohnson12]

Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one first. Great team, moving very fast.

[marcopicentini]

They do not support multi language.

[achempion]

document360 support i18n

[firecall]

In reality, you just have to get started.

Keep making things, iterating, grinding away.

Some things stick, some things don't.

You network and grow your business along the way.

That's the boring journey, but the reality for most of us.

[jasfi]

I agree. As you build you get a better sense for what people want. You also figure out how to build faster as you collect tech stack, or even more than one. When the right idea comes along, you can then move quite quickly.

[vsareto]

AI will probably be boring eventually since it's a large umbrella. Even if you scope down to LLMs and NLP, gluing those to work with your stuff in interesting ways will still seem boring compared to publishing papers.

What I never got about businesses doing technically boring things is that only the marketing/sales layer is adding value, so it's interesting people would chose a newer business over an older one. If you have a defining feature that sets you apart, that's not boring, it's innovative and interesting. So maybe web analytics/cron job/backups are still not boring because something is keeping major companies from crushing those specialties.

Web3's always been shit though.

[encoderer]

I think the important thing with AI is to start at the customer and work backwards to AI. If you are trying to think of cool things you can build with the new AI APIs you are probably doing it wrong.

One thing to remember about having competition is that most customers are not doing a “bake off” and they probably are not even aware of your competitors. If they found you, and you seem reputable, and you do what they need, and the price seems worth it, you can probably close the sale.

Of course the first one is key. That’s the hardest thing about starting from scratch. They have to find you.

[JohnFen]

As an old business mentor once told me: if you've found a niche where there is no competition, the odds are very good that there's some huge problem around addressing it that you haven't thought of. If nobody else is fishing in the lake, it's probably because there are no fish, the fish are poisonous, or there's a crazy person around who will shoot you for fishing there.

[riku_iki]

> AI will probably be boring eventually since it's a large umbrella.

it depends on if advancements will be slowdown. If capabilities will start growing exponentially aka singularity, then we will have very aggressive ride to the new level of humanity development.

[firecall]

Yep, we run an agency doing very boring things with Ruby on Rails. Not chasing the latest and greatest.

We also have side projects/businesses that solve very boring problems in boring old fashioned ways using Ruby on Rails.

And we are making a living in a remotish part of Australia and I don't have to commute and answer to people I dont like very much! :-)

[riku_iki]

> Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring...

I think you are missing part of finding customers in crowded market. It is very not boring and not trivial.

[tootie]

Web analytics isn't boring to me. I also think it's a really hard area to break into. There's no shortage of competition and none of them seem very differentiated.

[JohnFen]

I really don't think there is any sort of programming that is inherently boring. There can be programming that doesn't intersect with a given individual's interest, but that's different.

For every sort of programming I can think of, I can think of people who find it boring (even machine learning!) and people who find it exciting (even cron monitoring!).

[tiffanyh]

Cronitor.io is his business in case anyone is interested.

[e12e]

Thank you. Was wondering about that - no link in bio.

Clickable link:

https://cronitor.io

Ed: (business) might be built in the open - but (product) isn't F/OSS?

[huhtenberg]

> the cron one is mine

It did stood out from the list actually.

Web analytics is very interesting from the UI/UX perspective. In fact that's exactly what make Plausible notable - their super-polished wonderful UI.

Backup service is no less interesting, but from the technical perspective, especially around hardware reliability issues.

Cron monitoring - yep, boring as hell.