[austin-cheney]

Just build it because it’s something you want to build. My current side project is something I have been working on for 1.5 years and I have not shown it to anybody else. It does not solve for world peace but it does solve for multiple problems I have.

[montague27]

I've built one for about 3 years. It's simply a todo app, but it solves my personal worflow very well.

[raw_anon_1111]

To be frank, this is a horrible suggestion if you want to see whether it’s worth it if you are trying to monetize it.

First you validate your idea by seeing if there is a potential market for it. Talk to people. See if someone is excited about it. Show them your work in progress.

See if there is already a company in that space and find a differentiator.

[austin-cheney]

My personal experience doing this for about 1.5 years is that if your personal project solves meaningful problems that you have personally there are great odds other people will find it equally useful provided it does something different or better than existing solutions. That is all that's required to make an open source hobby project at least marginally successful, but you are correct in that it will absolutely not gauge value of a potential commercial project.

Paying users are very different than casual users. This marketability is nonetheless predictable though. Projects that solve a business problem of greater expense than what they cost in monetary charges pay for themselves, which is more than sufficient to determine product-market fit provided salesmanship and merchandising.

[raw_anon_1111]

There is much more than just creating a product that saves more money than it costs or even marketing.

You’ve got to get over the “no one got fired for buying IBM” problem. I’ve been on the decision making side enough times to know that it’s hard to get a business to trust an unknown vendor.

There was a “Show HN” here recently where someone was creating a SaaS product to manage 1 on 1s between managers and reports. I got a lot of push back when I said there was no way in hell any company would or should trust their proprietary company information to a one man SaaS.

The author hadn’t even heard about other well known SaaS products that had that feature as part of their product (Lattice).

You don’t start a project with the goal of monetization without looking at the competitive landscape and market positioning.

He was completely blind to the idea that no company of any size wants to manage logins either. Every SaaS company integrates with SSO. Just talking to one person who knew anything about business sales would know this.

I wouldn’t even think about doing a Show HN without at least talking about those issues.

[ideavo]

That’s honestly a great perspective