How did you come up with your idea?

Indie Hackers originally started as a blog where I interviewed indie founders about how they started their businesses.

The idea was inspired by a combination of (1) popular Hacker News discussions where people were super transparent in sharing these stories, and (2) Nomad List where @levelsio collected a bunch of useful information for nomads and put it in one place. I figured, why don't I do that, but for indie hackers instead?

I got ideas mostly while using existing products for which I can create a better version.

My Girlfriend broke up with me which lead me to feeling lost and depressed. I went around searching for a way to get ahold of my feelings found myself into the journaling space what ever app I tried I felt unsatisfied. So I went over to my computer and built my own called memoiri. With one goal: Open the App and start Writing. That is my usp I guess.

My idea is simple: help people raising their first puppy do more right and less wrong.
So I built a mobile app that helps you raise a happy, well-behaved dog.

The source of the idea was very simple: I have a dog, too, and I remember my own feelings (mostly confusion and frustration) when I first got her. You just don't know what to do and how to behave.
So I just thought, I'm not alone, and this is a problem worth solving.

I've been to different hotels in different countries and haven't found a useful guest app that makes my stay exceptional, every time I wanted to ask something I had to pick up the phone or go to the reception.
I had the idea to create a unique guest app that I could use in each hotel during my stay.

Having spent years on ideas that didn't gain traction I now use the following framework:

1. Looking at what other people are doing via Indiehackers, Starterstory, Openstartups

2. Pick a business model that aligns with my skills and has gained traction

3. Take said business model and vary it to a certain degree to suit end users or other verticals

My strengths lie in figuring out how rather than why something works. So instead of trying "reinvent the wheel" I now focus on projects that have already been proven and hit them from a different perspective.

Almost a year ago I launched Page2API, a Web Scraping API.

Before designing this API, I was scraping the web from time to time, and each time - I was building my own scrapers to get the data I need, and even knowing that there is plenty of APIs available, I couldn’t see myself using any of it.

Why?

• They were not intuitive and easy to use, and they lacked some features I needed.
• Most of them had a subscription-based model, so if you scrape from time to time - you have to either pay monthly, even when you are not using it, or ping-pong the subscribe-cancel thing.

So, I made the following commitment:
I must build a Web Scraping API that will be intuitive, powerful, and fun to use.

That's how Page2API came up.

Segue

Launched my first product 2 years ago but failed to find any paid customers until I started organically mentioning it on Reddit. (now a $10K MRR product)

Created an NLP engine to automatically scans Reddit and alert me when there is a popular Reddit discussion that is highly related to my product, so I don't have to hang out there all day long.

Going to launch this tool to the public soon.

getsegue.com

I googled info about the topic, but there weren't many resources on the topic and the exact keyword was available as a .com domain. The rest is history.

I wrote a full blog post that covers it in more detail: https://www.svgbackgrounds.com/i-founded-svg-backgrounds-how-i-arrived-at-my-perfect-business-idea/

I started a weekly newsletter project, but it became a burden because it took me more time than expected to prepare a new issue each week. Decided to learn how it could be possible to alleviate the workload by applying some automation with No Code tools (Mostly Zapier).

I recently launched the newsletter again after creating new automation workflows that only require around 30 minutes each week to ensure that everything works as expected and put together a new issue. I love thinking about new things that I can automate with a simple workflow and fascinates me how it can be plugged into my current workflow and achieve actual results.

On my first day of my last job, I walked into my office hoping to be greeted with high fives and fist pumps especially after my company's first big fundraise.

I got the opposite, I walked into a burning 🔥 fire where my company didn't realize that they had been credential stuffed for 3 months straight, and whilst walking through the door, they were facing the onslaught of account take overs.

Over time through putting out those fires, and scaling the system, I found 3 problems.

One, it was very hard to observe fraud within your platform, there was no Google analytics for Fraud, next if you have solved observability, you'd then need to ensure you can defend against the adversarial nature of fraud actors by means of controls and risk management.

This was the second problem, risk and ops turned into "if" statements littered through the code base and our teams were tasked with constant requirements to tweak and modify parameters and rules, it was a resource drain and didn't empower business users

Now lastly after you have figured out the first 2 challenges in observability and operations, the last thing that typically gets the least attention is the customer experience. In high volume b2c this matters a lot, and the way you manage your risk and optimize your cusotmer experience and conversion is a massive task.

This is how we started.

Authsignal.com is a suite of tools for platforms to observe fraud risk in their systems in near real time, make operational adjustments to how they manage risk via a no code rules engine, and passwordless authenticator flows that can be used to step up customers or to sign transactions, all through a single API call, augmentable into your current stack, with no additional vendors/sales people to talk to.

I have a concept to totally change our political discourse. I want to reduce polarity by aggregating comments. It came out of a lot of political research, and then reading an article about Alfred Russel Wallace (not Darwin, the other one). They were describing how gene expression works, and it hit me. There's a book called Range by David Epstein that talks about how much innovation comes out of low level lateral thinking. I highly recommend it

I was on an on-call shift. I woke up in the middle of the night and spent the next 30 minutes debugging. Eventually, I discovered an outage in an external integration caused it. I thought there should be an easier way to monitor the external services that a company uses. I started playing with the idea, and https://isdown.app was born.

My cofounder and I built a marketplace connecting companies with people & culture consultants. As a marketplace operator, you are constantly worried about disintermediation risks (in our case, users moving off the platform after initial match) and trying to make incremental solutions with carrots and sticks. Eventually we decided to decentralize and turn it into a user-owned marketplace. It made sense to better align incentives right alongside our users. This journey was extremely challenging as most tools and infrastructures are built for defi applications. We had to innovate and build a lot of web3 technologies ourselves to meet our use case and the needs of our users who are primarily non-technical and crypto unaware.

Well, this is how we landed on our new idea! We are now building a no-code platform that works as any app or community's web3 backend!

I'm a dev and I find the GitHub contributions board very motivating.

I looked for a habit tracker with a similar grid visualization—found none so I built mine (Habits Garden) and added confetti.

Users kept saying it helped them get things done, so I gamified the whole experience:

1. complete daily quests
2. earn rewards and grow a garden
3. compete with other users

It's been a few months. The app makes about $200/mo.

We started MemberScroll.com because ⬇️

Have you ever been to a class that required monthly payments or ever had a gym membership (I guess we all do at some point :P) ?

Have any of you been to independent gyms or small membership based businesses (tuitions, dance, yoga, music, etc classes) faced the issue of tracking memberships? We went to one such independent gym, amazing trainer and gym :) He is so incredibly passionate about his gym and members, but he had one major problem.

What issues did he face?

• Didn’t have time to use bloated gym apps
• Too expensive for his independent business
• Most apps not mobile-friendly owing to the too many number of features
• His gym wasn’t a franchise, didn’t need to collect a lot of data from members
• Simply not simple enough to use :(

But he was struggling to keep track of who paid, how much revenue he made a month and how many active members he had at any given moment. It was hard because he was using notebooks to manage all this.
The data of all the members and memberships were spread across 12 notebooks 😵 We asked him why didn't he look for software to manage all this? His response led to the creation of MemberScroll. There were a lot of options but he didn't want to use any of them because they all were too overwhelming for him.

The problem is all gym softwares are tailored for big gyms with employees, store, multiple classes etc. From our cold calls & research, we found out that all the small gyms we reached out were using notebooks to manage their memberships.
A small independent gym owner needs something simple, something that is not bloated with inventory management, POS integration, bookings, payments etc. A simple way to manage their members. That's it. That's why we made MemberScroll.

Innovative ideas are overrated, you can build something that already exists and iteratively improve it a bit at a time.

Wobaka is a simple and enjoyable CRM for small businesses with a flat pricing model.

First time I had the idea was after highschool in 2009. The CRM system we had to work with was terrible. You have no idea. So each sales rep used their own spreadsheet, paper & pen or whatever and then every now and then had to move the data to our system. One of my jobs was to do weekly/monthly reports of everything, so I had first hand experience with how painful it was to work with.

Fast forward a few years and a CS degree later and I'm running my own business, SaaS + Newsletter. Trying to book sponsors for the newsletter I used a spreadsheet and later Airtable as CRM. After a while, following up with each contact became such a giant pain so I started looking into various CRM software to help me. Here we go again...

Turns out, most CRMs charge per-user and therefore focus on the big customers. So I wanted to create something that myself and other small businesses would enjoy using.

That's when Wobaka was born, in 2019. A simple CRM system for small businesses with no per-user fees.

Speak to users or use social media as your foundation/launchpad, it's such a hidden gem to validate ideas. We're building https://app.contrarian.ai a search bar for your customers' pain points. We analysed billions of social media comments to help you pinpoint the issues your customers care about the most. I'm hoping that this will speed up the time from idea to execution.

Sponsy started from the need of @sircon to easily collect and manage sponsorships for IPO Brief.

We shipped our first MVP, then received this comment from @Manu_C:

I guess the main question is if you are making this for small newsletters or you want this to be a service Morning Brew would have used instead of building their own.

We dug deeper, validated it with interviews, and pivoted our MVP to what we are today: the modern all-in-one sponsorship manager for newsletters ❤️

What convinced us to go forward is our same customers. They are all hard-working creators and great humans, we seriously wanna help them succeed.

Main takeaway: create a product for people you would love to work with :)

A personal pain.

I had a burnout at McKinsey 😅 Left to get my energy back. Built a system of practices and tools for myself. Then realized that other people might need it as well.

docare.io

@dvassallo inspired me with his tweets about selling your sawdust to create https://reactapp.dev

I spent a lot of time in the creation of all the basic SaaS functionality (Authentication, Backend functions, Payments, Tests, ...) and thought it might be helpful for other indie hackers to publish a SaaS Boilerplate based on React, Firebase, and Stripe.

My most recent product is a swipe file of the most successful product launches on Twitter.

I came up with the idea of "Launch like Pro" because I see people launching products on Twitter all the time and failing at it repeatedly.

They get no traction, no users and no sales.

I myself have had a bunch of product launches that bombed.

While there are other people who seem to get incredible results from Twitter, especially on launch day, and even if they don't have a large following.

So I thought there was a need for a swipe file to get inspiration from and make product launches right. I think it will be a useful resource, let's see.

Still in the prelaunch period.

We started playing Axie Infinity (a crypto game) and got really good at it (top 200 players in the world out of 3 million at the time). We had loads of digital assets and started lending them to friends, teaching them how to play, and keeping a share of their earnings (worked like a web3 guild). Then we went to a Techstars event because we made around 15k from doing so, and got the idea to sell this service to others.

I started https://serpdog.io when I was researching new startup ideas, after my admission in the university for my bachelor's in Engineering. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and don't want to be dependent on my parents for everything.

So, I completed my MERN stack course and gave a kick-off to my project which took 6 months to complete. I was only able to sleep 4 hrs and sometimes 1-2 hrs when I have university exam, that was the effort I was giving to my project. Completely dedicated!!!

Serpdog is a Google Search API that allows you to obtain Google Search Results.

I get random ideas while going about my everyday life.

Here is a collection of ideas I have shared on Twitter (40 ideas at time of this comment).

Feel free to steal any of these 👆👆👆

For Research Triangle Jobs, I've taken inspiration from Remote OK and @searchbound

Remote OK, with having a job board for a specific niche – in this case a specific geographic location – Research Triangle in North Carolina.

Peter Askew, from finding a .com domain that I liked.

What's fun about the business is that, it's my foray into low-code/no-code. 95% of it is run on AirTable as the CMS and automations.

I like to say that I didn't found my startup, my startup found me.
I'm on a journey to living a more sustainable life and I find that researching and finding truly sustainable products take time and effort. askBelynda saves you that time and seamlessly provide reliably sustainable product recommendations while you're shopping on line.
I launched askBelynda today on ProductHunt,
check it out!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/askbelynda

I originally got the idea to build Catana while I was an employee at Shopify in 2019. At that time I was doing a bunch of open source work and was navigating through various codebases owned by different people/organizations .

I realised that forgotten notes (TODO, FIXME ...) written by developers in the code was a recurring problem and there wasn't much available solutions on the market.
I ended up creating an internal tool which received some traction but ultimately moved on to my regular projects.
It stuck in the corner of my brain that this would be a good fit for a product and a couple of years later here I am building it !

What: A collaborative trip planning app for managing multi-day itineraries; built for well-organized travelers.

Why: My spouse was driving me nuts with a Google Doc; it was impossible to move days around and plan things out without a lot of pain! I think this kind of inspiration is the best because you solve a problem that you can relate to and you become "customer zero". I've been dogfooding it and it's been a great experience :)

https://turas.app

I was researching problems in user onboarding & began to notice how social proof boosted sales. I tried out existing testimonial tools in the market but found them to be extremely limited in customising visual appeal & started building Famewall

While working on Famewall, I realised how hard it was to send a simple email related to product update to my customers. Most of the solutions I used suffered from email deliverability or weren't focused on SaaS workflows. This got me started with Mailboat

I thought, “What would make my working days 10x better?” And thus, Vocal was born.

My latest app (not yet launched nor listed here yet.. kinda stealthy on this one) came out of a need I had to support my stock trading.

I needed something halfway between a spreadsheet and a document - like a database, but fairly freeform. I tried to build my vision with Notion, Airtable, Obsidian, Coda.io, and at the very beginning, Google Sheets. None of these worked all that well for my less than traditional use case. Entering new data was a slow and tedious process (bad), and querying existing data was clunky and cumbersome. Queries were either too "rigid" (Airtable) or too barebones (Obsidian). I needed something that was simultaneously lightweight and fun with data entry, but at the same time very creative and fluid with the sorts of queries you can run.

Trading is stressful and fast paced. When a window of opportunity opens, you need to act fast. Sometimes you only have 30 seconds before the window closes. I needed to be able to verify a trade has more odds of working in my favor than not, and I needed to be able to do it fast. Having your tools work against you affects your emotional state, which severely hampers your trading capability. Whatever you use should be fun to use and it should never ever work against you.

There are existing journals like TraderSync (which i also use) - but those journals are for after the trade has been made.. I needed something to put my trade ideas in before taking them on. To rank them. And to be able to store quantified data at the same time, sort of showing the story of the market (and my thoughts) on any given day - and also be able to query THAT across time. Like a behavioral log, in specific market conditions. It all needed to be super fluid and freeform, but at the same time, queryable.

What I ended up developing is a journal-based database with very, very rich querying capability. And charts. Pretty charts. With little to no setup or fuss.

Since the software's inception: my trade win rate went from 60% month over month to 80%. My win rate this year sits at 73%, with a 23% overall return on capital at risk YTD. I'm projecting a 42% return this year despite the hectic market conditions.

Right now I'm working with my marketing guy and we're exploring other personas besides traders. We think there's utility in this sort of thing for others that could be really big. Particularly in the collaboration space in learning and research environments, as well as the marketing insights space. Anything where there are numbers and you need to draw comparisons.

I've been kinda hush about it because I violated my rule of validating the market before developing it - and not wanting to commit - but the kinda value this thing has brought me is immense and we think this could be something that has a little blue ocean to it.

Will be advertising it for beta testing soon and I'm super excited!

I was an "app" programmer before there were app programmers.

I grew up during the 60's, a child of the early space program. While my sister was attending peace rallies or running off to Height-Asbury in San Fransisco, I decided my parents needed a break, so stayed out of their way and glommed on to anything space or astronomy. That meant giving talks to my grade school classes about the most recent Apollo mission, going to our local community college every Friday night to their planetarium and observatory. I really wanted a planetarium of my own (even wrote a planetarium show for my 8th grade class)

Years later I started work on aircraft simulation graphics at the local NASA base, with the fabled computers that were literally the size of refrigerators but far less capable.

Jump ahead to 1985 when I went deep into my bank account and got an Amiga 1000 in the first week of availability. There was absolutely no software available except for a bootleg C complier, and couple of packages from Commodore.

One of the things it had that no one else had quite at the time, or at least below $10k, were programmable color maps. The Commodore 64/Vic20 systems had a limited fixed pallet, the Mac II wouldn't be out for two years, and for PCs were the Hercules cards and their dreadful fixed primary/inverse colors set.

In the Amiga package was something called "A-Basic" and one of the first things I noticed that I could actually program my own colors, much like the $20k Sun Microsystems color workstations in our labs at NASA.

I thought that it might be fun to see if I could make a star field, but with realistic looking stars that didn't have to be yellow, blue or magenta, or fat white blobs, by doing an intensity ramp from 1 to 15. I created about a 20 line Abasic program to generated 200 stars of random intensity and locations.

Wow.

I managed to secure a pre-release of a bootleg C complier, and with two Amiga floppies that were loud enough to hear on the moon, a book on astronomical math, compile times of 5 minutes of 50 lines of code to calculate the moon's position in the sky, and a whopping 1M memory.

I could now create my own planetarium!

18 months later I introduced Galileo for the Amiga, (changed to Distant Suns later due to trademark issues).

And I am still working on it.

My first publisher went out of business, my second publisher handled things for about 10 or 12 years. But with the Appstore, it made it easy to self publish. No printed manuals or books, no producing 1000s of CDs, or personally handing all of the incoming registrations.

Since then It was ported to the Windows 3, a rewrite for Windows 95, Linux, Old-Mac (MPW anyone?) and iOS.

It was in Newsweek magazine, in Commodore ads in Life and People magazines. I got fan mail from non other than Arthur C. Clarke, and heard it was used for constellation identification training for Special Forces.

It came out in the Appstore in Sept. 2008, did very well, was a premium product at $10/ea, and always in the top 5 in the educational market. And on iPad launch day in 2010, Apple selected Distant Suns as one of the two featured apps in the short lived Appstore. You'd launch that iPad store, and it defaulted to Distant Suns.

Sales started to decline when iOS 5 came out. The Appstore would previously show the top 5 titles in search results, but the new one dropped that down to just one. Sales dropped by more than half by the first week of iOS 5. (Someone tipped me off as to which Starbuck's Tim Cook would go to after a weekend jog. I camped out there for a few weekends, but no such luck. I wrote a "bug" report on the new store's design, the saw sales spike the next day when apparently someone took pity on me and had DS featured in New and Noteworthy for the next week. Then back off the cliff again.

It's now been through four rewrites, has a custom hand-polished OpenGL graphics engine, nearly all custom UI and is something I am very proud of. That kind of product is no longer a one-person title, so updating it while working doing a spinoff product, and demands of a "real job", is hard to do these days. I have about 10 years more of stuff I'd like to do, but just not much time to work on it.

As far as I know, is it one of the longest lived consumer titles still on the market. I think Excel beats it, and MSWord beats it by a couple of years. About half my career was devoted to this one title. And it was well worth it.

Here are the links to the Appstore and a video demo.

https://apple.co/2QIMn6X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_vHqjnRVI4

Just released a derivative product, Apollo360VR:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo360-vr/id1568902206

I started servicetags.co because I wanted submit a complaint from a vending machine that was broken

In my graduating years, I got some amazing instructors who would always make those moving speeches that makes you want to get up and make something of yourself. Those driving motivational forces kept me going and that is how I am striving still.

1. Talking a lot with our potential users
2. Failing with other ideas
3. Pivoting fast!

For https://tolt.io we came up with the idea after we were looking to set up affiliate marketing for one of our other projects, but couldn't find a free and affordable solution. Every solution we could find was expensive for us.

I'm currently working on a co-founder platform, and this idea stemmed from my own struggles in finding a co-founder through existing solutions. I felt frustrated because there were so many potential candidates, but there was a lack of information to help me determine who might be a good fit and I didn't have time to meet with 100 people.
Hence, I came up with the idea to develop a platform, much like a dating website, where users would respond to a set of questions, and based on their answers, they would be matched with candidates whose responses align with theirs.

I’m currently working on Binamite, and our story started with a message on our company Slack channel called #crazyideasonly. As you can imagine, the goal of that channel was to come up with the most ridiculous ideas, because most often than not, those are the ones that have the greatest impact.

Our idea was simple - build a crypto-fiat payment platform that offers the flexibility to get paid in a mix of crypto and fiat, with seamless payouts to bank accounts and wallet addresses across the globe. While the idea was born out of our own necessity, as we spoke to others in the industry, we realized we weren’t the only ones who needed this solution.

When we started building Binamite, our goal was to make it easier to pay our employees in crypto. Today, Binamite is about so much more than paying employees.

When people transact internationally, the time, cost, currency and methods must be agreed upon, and these are long-standing issues for cross-border payments. These problems are only amplified when dealing in digital assets.

With Binamite, we offer users a way to send money across permissionless blockchains without ever having to buy a cryptocurrency. It’s a way to use crypto to pay for services billed in fiat without having to sell your tokens. Binamite lets you use crypto as currency.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you! I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check binamite.com out. We launched in beta not long ago, and are adding features by the day.

Not a business, though regularly contributing to an open source project sometimes feels very similar :) As a product manager, I noticed developers really struggling with constant config of workloads across all their different environments. (Can anyone else relate? lol) I started working with some engineers who had the same problem, and we worked together to find a solution. The result of our collaboration is called Score (score.dev). It's great because it lets developers run the same workload on different technology stacks without having to be an expert in any one of them.

TLDR; I noticed a common problem and found people who were willing to solve it with me.

https://ktool.io

Sending articles to Kindle is as old as the Kindle itself. Amazon provided that functionality for years.

They just stopped all the development and it no longer works.

See the most recent reviews on their Chrome Extension. Number of 1-star reviews is staggering.

As someone who read a lot of blog posts and online content, I'm one of those frustrated users.

So I decided to build a hack-y version for myself.

So I surveyed Kindle users to see what they wanted the most with their Kindle other than reading books from Kindle Store.

Their answers are reading online articles & newsletters. And to sync with their favorite knowledge management app (Obsidian, Notion etc.)

After using it for a while, I think this is a good business opportunity:

1⃣ The demands are there. People are looking for alternatives

2⃣ I can reach out to each one of them to get feedback & to promote KTool

3⃣ More paid content are published online

I believe the creator economy is going to grow further.

And the result of that is more newsletter being published, more people reading blog posts & newsletter than ever.

In my dream, ktool.io would become the de facto tool for bridging the noisy, online world to your peaceful reading time on your Kindle

Ideas are just ideas. They aren't valuable until founders make them valuable. We all know this. And we all know that founders can't make an idea valuable by themselves: we need believers, collaborators, early adopters, promoters, community. We need to grow from the seed of an idea to a massive mango tree heavy with delicious fruit.

The idea that inspired my most recent startup, Slyk, was this: what if founders could monetize the potential of their vision at the earliest possible stage in order to incentivize and reward the growth they need to level-up and find the traction to continue, instead of being path-dependent on VC-funding for survival and success.

We all know the stat that 90% of startups fail. But less well-known is the fact that just about every startup fails because founders give up, not because they run out of money. Why do founders give up? They do the cost/benefit of whether they can make their seed sprout, take root, grow tall, bear fruit-- they lose hope.

They tell people their idea, but can't find believers. Or they have a few believers who are encouraging, but they can't find collaborators. Or they find collaborators and build a product, but they can't find early adopters. Or they get early adopters, but they grow slowly. Or they start growing, but not fast enough to convince VCs. After a string of VC rejections, most founders give up because it's just too damn depressing to be told no after all those other stages.

The idea that I've manifested with Slyk is to make founder success path independent of VCs and to change the paradigm of upside-sharing such that founders create a community of motivated and inspired and incentivized supporters at ever stage of their journey. Not just once they've been funded and can start paying for ads, code monkeys, influencers, etc.

And we see the problem I'm trying to solve with Slyk every day as startup founders and investors-- most startups don't find sufficient traction to attract VC interest. Most founders give up. Most people don't think of themselves as entrepreneurs because they see the failure rate. Better not to try. Better to cut your losses. Better to give up before you waste more time, money, effort.

And even most of those startups that do get funded-- because they check all the pattern-matching boxes of VCs-- fail. Most VCs don't make a better return for their LPs than treasury bonds. Most VCs are terrible at picking early stage startup winners.

This was the other insight I had about Slyk-- that the startups that are going to succeed are the ones where the founders don't give up, and they won't give up if they level up from stage to stage, from idea to mvp to users to community to hypergrowth and NFX. And so not only did I build the product that helps founders level up, but I also launched a fund to bet on the founders that use Slyk to do so. And I hope this becomes a way for VCs to do a better job at betting on early stage startups. (You can check out the Slykcess Fund here: https://angel.co/v/back/slykcess-fund-3).

The few VCs that do manage to hit 100X winners with regularity-- Sequoia, A16Z, Benchmark, USV-- create a virtuous cycle of attracting the strongest founders, helping them reach hypergrowth, achieving liquidity events, and returning a big juicy return to their partners and LPs, which attracts more talent and money. This is great for the founders who get the nod from the big leagues, but that's a small, small, small % of all entrepreneurs who decide to try to build a startup.

So my latest big idea is that we can create 100X successful founders that go on to build 100X the number of hypergrowth startups with coin-powered communities that make it easy for founders to reward the world for helping them grow the way they need to grow (users, sales, team, community) by rewarding the world for helping them grow from stage to stage with their own coin, and to redeem that coin for access, services, web3 tokens, ownership interest, collab opportunities, and more.

Visit Slyk.io if you want to check it out and join the Slyk coin-powered community (https://slk.slyk.io/?locale=en) to help Slyk grow (I'm just a founder like you all), earn SLK, and redeem SLK to collaborate with me and my team or get early access or even invest in our pre-seed round.

Entrepreneurship and startups need a new VC-independent success form factor and I think that I've created exactly that with Slyk-- coin-powered community. Here's a Q&A video I did for the Sequoia Arc Seed Fund (I'm not relying on VC money to make Slyk successful but it would be cool to get drafted up to the major leagues): https://youtu.be/2uZ6hGI2Ezk

P.S. My ideas for my previous fintech startups were as follows: Uphold (2013) holy cow there's a lot of interest in BTC on dev forums, what if we built an easy way for bitcoiners to convert in and out of fiat currencies, Airtm (2016) --minor currencies all lose value compared to USD and if localbitcoins can give the world a P2P on/offramp to bitcoin, then we can do the same thing for digital USD, Cadoo (2018)-- so much money is spent on fitness with such sub-optimal results and most of the spend is to create a loss-aversion motivation to get fit, what if we made it easy for people to bet on their future, fitter selves-- get fit, get paid.

started my guidance niche site on helpful and worthy books. Just by making small changes to your daily routine you can significantly increase your productivity, health and business success.
https://www.managerup.com/prayer-book

NeuML originally set out to analyze sports media and news back in March 2020. When COVID hit and sports disappeared for half year, plans changed. Luckily there was a technical framework that could be quickly applied towards another problem area, the Kaggle CORD-19 challenge. More on that can be read in this article.

From there, a couple open-source projects were born. paperai which focuses on reviewing medical/scientific literature and txtai, which uses machine-learning workflows to transform data and build AI-powered semantic search applications. These projects formed a base to offer consulting services around.

I created https://rektic.ai/en/rektic/ because 👇

I'm a freelance copywriter. One day, one of my clients asked me to write an article about GPT-3. And oh my God! What a discovery 😱 Is this going to replace me one day? Then, after some research, I realized that AI should augment Human Intelligence, not replace it.

So I decided to build a SaaS that helps creators to write faster. It was a painful journey, but I made it, and I'm so proud :)
Most importantly, I wanted to offer an all-in-one copywriting tool, not just an AI assistant.

Went to userinterviews.com and spoke to people!

A bit over a year ago, my brother and I built our first SaaS. Getting those first users was painful, but watching them leave was even worse.

We were asking ourselves what made them cancel their subscription and if we could have done something to prevent it. This made us think about making a questionnaire for our customers as a part of a cancelation flow which will be shown to them just before they leave forever.

With the option of presenting custom offers for your customers as a response to different cancelation reasons, Cancelo was born. Embedding it into our existing product really helped reduce churn rate a bit, and with the ton of feedback from our customers, we were able to implement those missing features, adjust a pricing model etc.

If you are struggling with high churn rate and would like some insight from leaving customers, give Cancelo a try.

I'm building https://app.boxtales.io to scratch my own itch. As a software lead dev I really like to communicate with box drawings. In many scenario's a simple drawing with boxes and arrows can really clear things up between team members.
But fiddling with mouse and clicks and drag and drop ruins the fun, so I created a and https://app.boxtales.io to be able to program my drawings. And have them animated too.

Headlamp's Origin Story is here: http://headlamptest.com/#why-headlamp

We came up with ScrapingFox after not being able to find a cost-affordable and reliable web scraping API which we wanted to use to scrape real estate sites.

I started using netlify for blogging+paid course and was struggling with the platform for basic functionality of giving access to the paid course while limiting access to normal users so i decided to code solution for myself. After some time i shared it with my friends and they started using it too so i opened it to internet to see if it has any potential.
https://github.com/newbeelearn/sserver

Oxogen.io helps new founders get peer and expert advice specific to them consistently for about the same cost as Netflix subscription.

I am a startup mentor and so see first-hand the importance of the support mentors give but it can be hard to access mentorship without either repeatedly joining programmes or giving away part of your idea (or lots of cash!).

For https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sendfy I was thinking how nice would it be if I could pay with cryptocurrencies at my favorite restaurant?
I have asked some business owners in my city why they couldn't accept cryptocurrencies. They said: "there is not way to accept them in local stores".
So I started developing a SaaS which can allow you accept cryptocurrencies physically and in your website.
This is my first product and I am looking for feedbacks to know what exactly business want.

Hi I started working on my project after attending a QA conference some time ago, there was a great lecture about test design and some people, including me, were asking if there are tools to facilitate use of decision tables in testing. There are many QA tools but those don't focus on use of any methodology for creating tests to achieve highest coverage so I came up with an idea and started hacking away Shapest.io 🟧🔶

IMO it's good to expose ourselves to various experiences because ideas appear unexpectedly when we familiarize with an unknown.

Managing window mgmt on my macOS was one of the day-to-day difficulties I used to face as a Product Manager.

My usual day involves working with several teams on various things, therefore my workspace is a disaster, & I am constantly fighting myself to order those windows.

That's when I was tinkering around the idea what if there was a 1-click way to organize the windows based on any situation I am in.

Spaces for macOS - It's time to reclaim your workspace on macOS.

The term "Spaces" was inspired from Apple's Mission Control feature(in macOS).

https://bit.ly/3HzIE7y

I set up Launcher after a couple of friends of mine came to me to help them. They were setting up a business and needed a name for it, as they just couldn't come up with anything decent and hated the process. They'd paid a brand naming company a few hundred dollars to come up with some name ideas, all of which sucked. They were so generic, not available as domains and half of them were trademarked.

Given my background in branding strategy and identity design, combined with more recent experience as a UX Designer, my passions lie in creating visual identities and solving design problems that get people excited - and I think that shines through in the work.

So they came to me, I put together a shortlist of brand names that they loved, and also created a logo for them. That was the unofficial beginning of Launcher. Now I help other entrepreneurs in the same position my friends were in, by giving them a name for their brand or product, and a logo to match.

We are a bunch of developers who have come up with a new SaaS app to help you set up and grow your SaaS business. Salable was born out of frustration with existing solutions on the marketplace. We help you easily set up and manage subscriptions, licensing, pricing tables, payment providers, and single APIs and SDKs . We have recently also developed a way to easily monetise your Trello Power-Ups! We've built plenty of Power-Ups in the past and always ran into unnecessary complications when it came to monetising them. We decided to make Salable to "scratch our own itch" as well as help out the Trello dev community. Would love for you to check it out, and provide any feedback or questions. We're still early stage so any suggestions are much appreciated!

https://trello.salable.app/

https://www.salable.app/

I currently work at a company that struggles to motivate its employees. While the salary policy is excellent across all positions, the employees still lack motivation. Through research, I've concluded that the absence of recognition from upper management for their work is a significant factor. As a result, I've begun developing a platform based on a points-based system to streamline goal management and enhance employee recognition

ALLO and Cockpit came to life because, as a founder, I was totally swamped with messages and requests from my team, scattered all over different apps like Slack, Jira, GitHub, Figma and so on. It was a total headache, and I wasted so much time just jumping between them.

After talking to other managers and leaders, turns out they felt the same pain. So, we created the Unified Inbox to bring everything together.

I'm still on link-posting probation here. allo .io.

The few problems I've decided to tackle and turn into business ideas are from my everyday work (web design and development) - I believe that trying to solve a problem in an area you are familiar with has a better chance to become a real solution that people will pay for.

The Comments are awesome..

My first company:
What: Using high-temperature superconductors for satellite attitude and altitude control systems, aka ADCS, and Propulsion hardware - (Zenno Astronautics)

Why: To be very honest, the initial idea was a bolt of lightning coming out of conversations in our under-grad labs. What initially inspired us was its novelty, but what convinced us to pursue it in earnest was technological feasibility, market research on the commercial opportunity, and investor appetite to fund it.

--

The second company (we pivoted recently)
What: AI-powered browser extension for instant, personalized Emails and LinkedIn messages (Segna)

Why: This started as a tool to solve an internal need - improving the conversion rates of outbound messages without spending 10 minutes per message trying to personalize it. The uptick in conversion was so dramatic we started sharing it with some of our investor’s other startups, and the interest was really high. The rest became history and we pivoted to focus solely on this.

What: an open-source toolbox for application security engineers (and commercial fully-managed SaaS version that's about to open beta access) - https://github.com/secutils-dev/secutils

Why: It's simple, I'm an application security engineer who has collected tons of code and shell snippets over the years of full-time job. However, navigating through all these snippets now, remembering how to use them, and making sure they still work can be a real pain and time-sucker. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this issue, which is why I decided to organize them into a single, user-friendly web app. This app provides up-to-date tools for the day-to-day job of application security engineers and curates a list of helpful and relevant resources.

whoa, a very good question.

I would so much love to tell about it, but as I haven't started the idea to the fullest,
(am just about to start beta testing),
I can say the following:

Analysing, what is already there. What already works.

Doing some tweeks (in theory)

Being creative, and having some experience in the area of social networks, customer care etc.

It is not a business but I actually wrote a post about it:
https://chedoku.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/how-i-accidentally-invented-a-new-type-of-chess-puzzle/

It's often cited that data scientists spend 80% of their time preparing data. Despite this, the typical autoML solution supports only parts of the remaining 20% work in model development.

For years, @salma_remyx and I have helped groups struggling with the costs of data acquisition and processing.

Recently, we've been inspired by the success of low-code applications to bring technical workflows to a broader audience. We're excited to soon release our own autoML which we believe will make it 10X easier and faster to develop custom AI models.

Usually, a problem I faced myself and couldn't find a solution.

Here's the story behind my current idea -

As a 12/y motion designer, I found it difficult to keep up with the pace of innovation and rapidly evolving motion design space. I'm 100% for innovation, but I simply couldn't keep up with all the new stuff.

So to solve this, I created a fairly robust database in Notion to help me make relation between tools, identify new opportunities, and just make more sense of everything.

I figured others might find this helpful too, so I'm now transforming the database into a resource website with a bunch of helpful features.

And to add some extra value, I decided to document my journey and share everything I learn with the creators community (which might also lead to a handy little case study/playbook).

I sold my consulting firm,
took time off,
helped some friends build their companies during that time,
realized I really love that helping / advising role,
caught the creator/ indie/ solopreneur bug,
turned that help I did for fun for friends into products
for which I'm hoping to bring down in cost over time so more people can benefit from it.

Think of something you do to get around a problem.

Make the fix into a new product.

Over 20 years ago, I would rip my favorite radio shows onto a mini-disc and walk around London listening to them on demand.

If I had the know-how and connections back then, this would have transformed into what we know now as Podcasts.

I work in the market research industry so I felt like it was natural to create a product in it.

To disrupt the status quo and to make people think “oh I didn’t think I needed that, but I now can’t work without it”

I was on r/tinder and in some comments it was going how to make a bot for tinder... one made a easy script to just swipe right. I was thinking i can and i want something better then this for my use case. so it started and now 2 years later with version 2.4 im still getting things i can add.

I thought, wouldn’t be fantastic if someone who understands the industry you are in (in my case blockchain) and is closely monitoring it could provide you with the most up-to-date, unbiased information in a single email (instead of me navigating Linkedin, Twitter, and other websites)?

Welcome to the Blockchain From First Principle weekly newsletter where I curate some of the news, summarise reports and look at #blockchain, #crypto and #web3 from the first principles for those seeking to understand more and stay ahead of their game.

Applying the first principle thinking means "boiling things to their most basic truths and then reasoning up from there”. Not only Musk believes in it, but so do Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Feynman.

...and like that the journey started.

Find out how is it going: https://blockchainfromfirstprinciple.substack.com

i needed such (pretty basic?) feature. as a music lover, i was surprised that such a service almost didn't exist (the few ones i found weren't as accurate as one would want).

The idea for STRisker came about after listening to Richard Fertig on the importance of zoning and regulation for short-term rental owners/investors.

I had spent two years working at a startup that monitored short-term + vacation rental compliance for local governments. After leaving, I worked on a few projects (Android apps, QR code API, and a service that took care of getting your trash bins to and from the street) some of which have turned into nice 1-5 hours a month side hustles. None of them really took off.

My previous experience helping local governments with Airbnb/VRBO regulations made me realize the difficulty investors/operators were having understanding the rules and regulations. After researching and talking to numerous people in the industry, it was clear there were limited solutions. I've launched an initial MVP of STRisker as a resource for property owners to find, understand, and legally operate within short-term rental regulations.

I came up with an idea to visually compose container based projects. So my tool uses drag-drop to generate a docker-compose.yml file. Its open source https://github.com/nuxxapp/nuxx, and deployed https://nuxx.io

Originally, I wrote the frontend in Angular. Now I am doing a full rewrite to React (react-rewrite branch). Please star the repo, alot of cool things are coming like actual deployments and monitoring to ECS. Kubernetes manifests generation. Visual layered container builds/code generation.

Also, a rename, to something that makes more sense. Ideas are welcome!

Hi all.
My initial idea started as a pandemic pet project back in 2020.
I started playing games as a new form of entertainment and watching streamers on Twitch.
I had this urge to play with people (all sorts of multiplayer games) as a way to stay in touch with friends.

I experienced the problem that so many gaming communities are disconnected from each other and hard to find.
I joined so many Discord servers ( Looking for Group channels) only to realize that the more Discord servers I joined, the more 'spammy, and noisy' it got.
Discord servers can be so overwhelming and the more they grow, things get out of control.....
I'm looking for a teammate or gaming buddy, I'm not interested in other people's gifs, memes etc.
All I want is for someone to RVSP, yes, no or maybe, and afterwards we can chat about other things.
After conducting a few surveys and dozens of user interviews, it turns out I'm not the only one experiencing this problem.
So many Twitch streamers (publicly saying this on stream) have started to leave or mute Discord servers due to information overflow or just irrelevant Discord push notifications.

Out of this pain point, I started GatherIn: https://www.gatherin.app/
Find, create and share your game sessions/events.

I was inspired by Calendly which solves a big problem of 'email ping pong'.
Instead of writing 20 emails just to confirm a Zoom call and finding out in which time zone everyone is, Calendly sends you a link where you can RSVP in one message.

The current alpha of GatherIn consists of a Game Plan which contains a feed of your upcoming gaming sessions. You as a gamer can curate your own feed and above all, avoid all that Discord noise. Once you create a session you can share a unique URL across all platforms.
Is your Guild planning a raid upcoming Saturday? You will see it in your Game Plan and can RSVP etc.

Gamers are also busy people. They take gaming seriously just like other people take their Golf membership seriously or their family dinner.
If a gamer takes gaming so seriously, why not provide a serious solution?
So many gaming communities are run like Fortune 500 companies so I intend to fill that gap.

So far we have around 900 on our waiting list and are gradually onboarding our first alpha users.

My idea started from trying to get updates on my kids soccer games while I wasn't around. Instead of text my partner for updates scoreboardlabs.com allows me to follow along the score and timelines of their games. While its not the same as being their at all I feel somewhat connected to whats happening.

Similarly my buddies and I golf a couple of times a year. Its wildly uncompetitive and competitive at the same time if that makes any sense. For this years round I created a digital leaderboard where we can update the scores as we go around the course. It adds that extra layer of spice and games man ship to our tournament.

We are building mankind's digital interface to the Sun, democratizing the access to insolation data and thereby enabling our customers to integrate the most abundant source of energy into their lives and businesses. Meet Shadowmap!

I had the idea 9.5 years ago during a cold and dark Viennese winter. Roads are narrow here and buildings rather high and for 2 consecutive weeks I couldn't see the Sun in the sky. And I love the Sun! I thought there should be an app that at least shows me where around lunch break (i.e., Sun is at its highest point in the sky) I could find a sunny spot. My plan was to build a 3D maps app that visualizes solar shadows anywhere on Earth, at any time; kinda like 3D Google Maps with Sun and time.

6 years and one startup later, I finally started to work on it and during this time I realized that there are many use cases for it. Our biggest verticals now are real estate (people want to find bright apartments and check the light situation throughout the year) and solar power. But it is also used in photography, outdoor sports, tourism and more.

Shadowmap is available as iOS app or web app, running directly in your browser – this way it can also be integrated into websites and other apps.

Please try it out and tell me if you like it!

I'm going to share the idea behind my most profitable and sustainable business because I think that's what people need to hear right now:

In 2014, I sold my coffeeshop in Downtown Phoenix and decided to work remotely. I had been drumming up business ideas and websites on the Squarespace platform since 2008 and thought maybe, just maybe, others would benefit from this skill I've developed over the years.

While I had ideas before on graphic design (boy was I shitty at that) and writing (good but not great yet), I felt that enough people with money didn't know how to design their own website and could benefit from the existence of one for their business.

I decided to target people between the ages of 33-60 because in my mind, a 21 year old didn't have the money or care to pay me for something like that.

I reached out to markets I knew fairly well: Finance and Real Estate. My Mom was a mortgage broker and my Dad was in construction, giving me enough baseline knowledge to know what the hell people in the industry were talking about.

From there, it was a matter of repeated "I can help you with that" and a few warming up of leads (you can read more about that in my book: https://loveisthebusinessplan.com), along with aligning myself with a really big fish whose back I rode the train on.

The cross between what I was doing for fun, who was emerging, and who had the money to pay for this valuable service was how I made my decision. And it worked! 8+ years of a sustainable business and 6 figures last year as a solo female entrepreneur. 💃🏻

Always based on your professional business interactions and spotting pain points.

At my company, we needed a tool for our front-end developers to test their front-end code better.

The solutions out in the market weren't quite what we needed, so I developed a simple service for our team to use.

Then I thought, hmm, that could be something other developers might need, so why not publicly share it?

It's still in progress, I don't think to make money out of it but if I do that would be super. It's currently in a Beta version and I'm still working on some issues and receiving feedback from a closed beta testers.

Will share it here when its done and completed.

I built tuthub.io because I have a programming Youtube channel (over 200k subs) where people kept constantly asking me where they can find the best tutorials to learn topic XYZ (if I didn't make one).

My business is RD Coached, I advocate for the wellbeing & performance of software developers, software development leaders and software development teams. I'm a mindset coach and trainer as well as a qualified personal trainer.

I actually left my job as a software architect to start my business after over 2 decades in software development.

I worked at all levels - junior, senior, manager, contractor and architect and struggled with self-belief and confidence in many of my roles. When I worked on my physical and mental wellbeing things improved considerably for me.

I noticed more and more that developers around me were struggling even worse than I was, particularly with their mental health and there was so little support in this area.

I realised the best way to deliver this important message was for it to come from someone who has been there and done that.

And so... I quit my job and started following my passion.

I started http://indie.watch/ after being inspired by IndieHackers.

I've been an iOS Developer for 10 years and I slowly started to realize that it wasn't iOS that I liked as much as the community and the growing number of indie devs in it.

I had built apps, websites, and electronics projects, and they were all equally satisfying, so I slowly realized that I actually enjoyed working with other creatives and that the tech stack was always secondary.

Since I had a small audience within the iOS space, I thought I'd stay in that niche and started IndieWatch which is a weekly newsletter featuring the best apps created by indie iOS developers.

I was trying to launch my business as an Indie Hacker!

It took me months of coding on nights and weekends to get a solid app shipped with hosting, authentication, payments, database integration, subscriptions, etc. This was crazy to me. As an Indie Hacker you have to assume that many of your businesses will fail, so ideally you can quickly and cheaply spin up new ones to test new ideas.

So I decided to put together a project template that included all of these core business features so I could just clone the template and launch another business - this time in minutes, not months.

So now I can spin up a new SaaS app using my favorite tech stack in minutes and can typically launch my new business from it in a matter of days.

My template uses my favorite tech stack:

• Frontend: Svelte / Sveltekit
• Backend: C# / .NET
• Database: Postgres

Everything is containerized and configurable so it's easy to deploy and run anywhere - Google Cloud (my choice), AWS, Digital Ocean, etc.

• My project template: https://cloudseed.xyz
• Why I like this tech stack: https://labs.hamy.xyz/posts/the-best-tech-stack-saas-apps-2022/

I came up with https://myperfectjob.club/ after a scroll on LinkedIn and seeing myriad posts of people hiring and hoping that A) I gave a shit or B) I know someone who gave a shit. Plus, myriad contacts from recruiters for roles I would never be interested in.

I kept thinking that there had to be a better way.

I am building a reverse job board where product people (designers, developers, managers, etc.) can define what they want as well as what they don't want to be doing. Folks hiring can then narrow down and find a few profiles of people who want to be doing what they are hiring for.

I also wanted to try removing names, gender, etc. and try to help people be judged on what they are doing and what they want to be doing.

The scam is on the increase. I could remember my ugly experience with a scammer that posed to be crypto investor. I was convinced to create an account on their website. I did, i invested 100$ as my first investment, i was paid my profit after somedays, then i invested 3k and i got my profit, that made me invest a bigger amount of $33,000 and this guys came up with different stories and told me to get 10 people to invest before they would pay me back my money. That was when i knew that i was being scammed. I became frustrated and decided to search for solution on how to recover my money from them. I was desperate until i was told about a recovery expert that does wonders, well, my funds was recovered from the scammers including the profits. Below is the contact of the recovery expert incase you need his service
Email: CryptoSwiftRecovery@gmail . com
Whatsapp: +1(915)8438544

I was looking for a professional service (I’ll elaborate when my MVP is farther along. It’s a WIP right now). But it was such a pain to find anyone reliable so I’m working on a service to find them.

The idea behind behind https://diigs.carrd.co/ was that my partner and I wanted a way to track and organize our diy (do-it-yourself) home improvement projects in a simple and straightforward way. We used nultiple tools together, but wanted a single platform to do it all in that was cost effective and easy-to-use.

That is exactly what I'm building, and I hope to release end of August, sign up if you're interested! 🙏🏾

I started Tech company GraffersID.com, by considering the factors affecting the growth of the startups, why many startups or enable to grow 10x.

I started the WBE Space because, as a indie hacker, I was feeling lonely and did not have anyone to share my journey with.

I created Setupshub as a challenge for me to master Firebase and React Js, but the initial spark that led me to create it was when I saw users on Reddit asking the names of accessories and Setup parts (they can't share links due to communities rules ), then I said why don't I create a mini platform to share their Setups and they can mention the names of items as well as monetizing it by providing an affiliate link... so I did!
Ps: I'm new to the Startups world so maybe I'm committing mistakes but I'm still improving 🐱‍💻

The best ideas for me came from listening to people.

I sold my previous side project after spending years on it and never seeing much traction (the buyer obviously saw an opportunity).

Looking to get back into the game I was thinking through what frustrated me about building my last app. That was everything that was unrelated to the actual application itself. The landing page, email signups, pricing and subscription billing.

I posted the idea to build a SaaS that handled all that for you on IndieHackers. After some feedback, I narrowed it down to handling subscription payments and billing with Stripe.

What convinced me was that there was another company on IndieHackers doing the same thing. That convinced me there was at least some small market for my idea, which eventually became PriceWell

For Parthenon (getparthenon.com), I was looking at the Laravel Spark landing page and thinking that there wasn't a Symfony version. Then I remembered how at all the companies I go to, I have to deal with the same issues. And that there wasn't really a commercial solution.

For Blether (https://blether.chat), I wanted a live chat for getparthenon.com but I hate cookie banners. I wanted a solution that would be GDPR-compliant and doesn't require cookies.

Few of my founder friends always complained about hiring and when I dug deeper i founder certain issues that were common. Although most of it could have been solved by any ATS, it was hard to find a cost-effective one that can be just plug and play.

To solve this issue I am working on www.Solidhire.io

While living in the US, I had noticed homeowners struggling with their property tax. Several states have high property tax. I got an opportunity to work with a large commercial and industrial property tax consultant. During that time I got the idea to help homeowners with their appeal process. Most homeowners faced difficulty finding comps. Hence, built squaredeal.tax to help homeowners get their comps in a few clicks and in a few seconds as opposed to several hours that they would take otherwise.

I can't answer that yet because I just started my journey in indie hacking. But I'm learning from all of the answers here. Thank you very much!

My app today is a wishlist app for content creators to get gifts from fans. It makes 14k profit/month and is rapidly growing at just 1 year old.

It was my first attempt at an indie hacker project after teaching myself to code. I was really picky about what idea I wanted to go with.

I ended up picking one that I could get a lot of validation for early on.

My friend came to me offering to split 50% of the profit she made if I built a wishlist for her that she could get the cash from. I figured maybe more people near her niche would give me just 10%. I did some market research, dm'ing hundreds of NSFW content creators, to take my survey or get on a call. It seemed like people wanted it.

Like most indiehackers out there, I was lost trying to find a sense of purpose, to contribute my skills, and build something that can benefit the community.

That's when I thought why not build something that I am passionate about which is the UI/UX industry.

I started working on side projects at night and on weekends and juggling my full-time job as a Full Stacked Dev specializing in UI/UX in the daytime.

Howuku Web Optimization started out as just a very simple Feedback Widget tool, we then slowly pave our way into the all-in-one territory and pivoted into an all-in-one experience optimization tool for marketers.

Today we have developed our own in-house recording algorithm with 13 optimization features and offer our service at much more affordable price plans than any other competitors in the market.

To all the indiehackers who are still struggling to find ideas, just start on something small start, learn to market it, get feedback, pivot, and grow!

Over quarantine, I started a food blog on Substack. I'm a software engineer and not a writer so this was something very new to me! Being a software engineer tho, I kept trying to bring automation both necessarily and unnecessarily (lol) into my workstreams for the blog. One of these tools helped me quickly post on all of my social media channels after I published each issue. As I became more involved in the Substack community, I realized this is something others writers and bloggers could use!

And thus, Newsletter to Socials was born
https://newslettertosocials.com

Created Rise Energy because i was tired of feeling the 2pm caffeine crash and was tired of paying exorbitant amounts of money per month for coffee / energy products. When i researched how bad energy drinks actually are, I ended up down a long rabbit hole of why coffee/red bull works the way it does and why it has the effects it does on the body.

That led me to discover transdermal delivery, and ultimately Rise Energy's transdermal patches. I figured if i could tap into the power of transdermal delivery and its higher bio-availability, i could deliver caffeine and other vitamins into my system and take advantage of delayed release to stave off the crash.

Turns out i was right, my test group loved it, and i am launching soon.

tryrisepatch.com is the site i've got up for it so far

I had a list of 40+ startup ideas after failing my first startup.

Versoly - Website builder had the biggest market and excited me the most. I saw (and still do see) a path to build something 10x than current solutions.

I thought it would be easy to market to other SaaS founders if I had good SaaS templates + features.

Turns out that was kind of wrong as most paid customers I got were developers and didn't share the product.

I was just strolling to my local Aldi to buy some groceries. Nothing special, no great story. But, dinner that night was particularly satisfying.

The Chatty Mammoth, if you're interested.

I started writing on Substack in Dec 2021, and was looking for any way to grow my subscriber list.
I found out Morning Brew used a referral program to gain >1.5 million subs, so I wanted to do the same, but no referral tools existed for Substack.

That's when I came up with the idea for Subshark.io . A light weight referral tool to create a referral program on Substack, or any newsletter.

With StandupWizard, it largely came from having used numerous other popular Slack standup bots and none really hitting the spot for me as an end user. It ultimately came down to me believing I could build one that's more enjoyable for the end user (devs, etc) while still being valuable for management to gather needed insight.

I also have a number of ideas that none of the others have added yet that I would have killed to have back when I was using them, so I'm excited to see where it goes on that end.

how you landed on that idea

While visiting Coffee Creek Correctional Facility for women to talk about startups and entrepreneurship

what inspired you

After selling my co-working space of 11 years last year, wanted/needed to startup something new that also made the world a better place and generate revenue that had great impact

what convinced you

Talking to a few folks whose insight and acumen I had total faith & trust in

I started https://meatyum.com/ to track meat specials for my own interests. It spun into an entire project to server the carnivore/paleo/keto/whole foods communities.

Wrote a recipe-finding app to save myself time and work when it comes to family meal planning. It's pretty rough, but I'm glad I got started. I plan to build it out for myself, and share with more folks as it gets off the ground. https://www.planmy.recipes

Fell into it by accident from a referral for being good at marketing and morphed into a company.

In may case I just wanted to have some original and customisable bicycle light for my own so I started Bike Pixels as side project and also to learn some basic electronics and 3D printing staff and now is still on the making and I created a few prototypes :)

I'm building PodQueue because I'm a longtime InstaPaper user, and I always wanted something like it for audio, but nothing out there ever worked the way I wanted to let me quickly and reliably save links from my phone or desktop and have them show up in my podcast feed automatically. Now that I've been using it myself for a while and getting feedback from users, I've got even more ideas for where I want to take it!

https://www.adama-platform.com started by trying to take control of a document schema such that I could have a static type and then add the ability to undo/redo changes. From there, I thought to add privacy which require more language bits, and that was explosion of interesting ideas. At the end of a few long nights, I had the basics for a platform which could run entire board game infrastructure.

Now, I'm trying to generalize and continue expanding as I invent new technologies to work well against it.

Truth be told I didn't "come up" with the idea for fabform.io . I saw a few other companies do forms handling services and thought I could create a better forms backend with anti spam forms , built in forms captcha and loads of other features.

Hi @csallen here goes https://www.skilledup.life/background-to-skilledup-life/

The predecessor

1. Idea on 1st April 2020
2. Went live on 7th April 2020
3. First customer 20th April 2020
4. Shut down on 31st July 2020 - Gave all money made to NHS Charities. Created and launched https://skilledup.life on 1st Aug 2020

Now:

• Volunteers: 8,072 from 85 countries
• Tech startup customers: 26 with £753 MRR

A very long way to go.

Targets for the end of the month

• Volunteers: 11,000
• Customers: 100

I’m still trying to come up with a good idea that I can make a business from!

However one good one I’ve gotten recently was README blocks. Which is an open sourced Markdown “UI kit” where developers can skip the boring process of making their own README.md file by copying and pasting different sections into it.

For me it was my inability to scale without automation. I wanted to do more but needed something to allow me to automate my processes.

I don't have a business, per se, but I have a personal website where I post original articles on education, writing, and creativity. I also blog about a current screenplay I'm writing (what I'm learning and so forth). I'm inspired by Austin Kleon's SHOW YOUR WORK and other online writers like Dave Perell, Paul Graham, etc.

We are working on Multy, an open source tool to deploy and switch to any major cloud provider.

The idea came about when my cofounder was working at a fintech and they had their whole infrastructure in Azure. Then their sales team landed a big customer, but they were only compliant with AWS. The devops team had a meeting and realized it would take 1 year to move, even though they were using Terraform - turns out terraform providers are very different across clouds. They ended up losing that customer.

So now we're on a mission to tackle cloud vendor lock-in and make companies less dependent on which cloud they choose.

I came up with InboxesApp purely out of something I wanted for myself. I knew disposable emails were around for a while, and I know they’re commonly used, but I wanted them to be long lasting and easy to access. In comes InboxesApp: a chrome extension which lets you create as many disposable emails as you’d like, delete the address when you’re done with it, and it’s all within the browser.

User growth is slow as im mostly doing SEO and Twitter, but it’s on the up as are MAU. I’ve paid features working, but need to finish the payment/stripe work before I release them. There seems to be some demand from the little on website analytics I’m doing!

I started Keytunity as a set of Ruby scripts on my computer. I was using it to help me make the most of Google Search Console for my own sites, it kind of grew and I started to see how effective it was. That's when I decided to turn it into an app.

My project idea came around for my uni thesis on procedural music generation using AI. The thesis was a research paper with no real project behind it. A couple of years (and a few other failed projects) later I looked at the existing products in the focus music space. They use gimmicks or 'science' to alter the music which supposedly helps focus.

I thought, 'I don't want the gimmicks, and I don't need AI', so I set off to make ambient music generators without all the add-ons.

What inspired me, is the result that I needed to achieve. We all have in different aspects on how are we going to do it but we are already pleased by the outcome that we are seeing in the future.

For me, it was building a product for myself. I know, at the very least, one person wants the product I am building!

I've been working in privacy for 4 years across some big companies and kept seeing the same issue arise around personal data access. I noticed a lot of the solutions were trying to sell the cure instead of the prevention. So I just took the most difficult problems and worked backwards to see how to solve them. Then from my experience in PgM and Product, learnt to code (with some no-code help) and built an MVP which is now meeva.

I have invested in crypto since 2017 and developed a method for screening which coins are strongest. I simply developed a python-based screener (https://coinrotator.app) and thought it would be super fun to share with others who are interested in active crypto investing.

I worked on a few GPT-3 powered applications. I wanted to use GPT-3 for various tasks, including writing content and code. Going to the GPT-3 playground was friction for me. The content tools that use GPT-3 charge you a premium. Then it struck me that AI can be made to work closely for day-to-day writing like emails, blogs, or even fixing grammar mistakes, while still using your own OpenAI keys.

I built a Mac app, https://elephas.app, that works across applications. Still in the early days.

TL;DR: inspired: mostly by scratching my own itches, convinced: mostly by doing a market assessment.

Place Card Me - an online place card maker - came about from my own wedding. My wife and I wanted to use something like this site to make our place cards, but couldn't find anything we liked. She ended up doing it by hand and I thought "there has to be a product that can do this". I became convinced when I saw tons of people selling Place Card templates on Etsy and realized I could do it better.

SaaS Pegasus - a Django-based SaaS boilerplate - came about after building Place Card Me and another SaaS app. I realized - as I copy/pasted from one project to the other - that there's a ton of boilerplate stuff that every application needs, and that could be a valuable product for other dev/founders. I convinced myself by determining that there were several similar products for other frameworks, but there wasn't anything particularly good for Django.

I was managing a design team in healthtech startup and they kept asking me for product analytics tools, but we could never get anything through the compliance process and/or procurement teams because we couldn't risk sending patient data to third party servers. It felt very solvable, so decided we'd go about doing it. Somewhere along the way we basic ended up making a more privacy friendly and compliant version of Hotjar et al.

https://bit.ly/3HJ7ZvY

I was sitting in my office, there was 2 babies crying in the other room (working from home during covid) and i looked up and had this powerful wave wash over me. It was even a choice, I knew I had to build VR shops as no one else was going to do it. I didn't even have a choice in the matter, I am being driven by something deep within.

feetr.io was initially a way of me automating and refining my investment strategy. I had been using the approach for a while to great effect but I wanted to spend less time mindlessly data gathering.

I was originally designed as a tool for myself, and it worked really well. I went from spending hours a day poring over communities looking for my next stocks, to having a copious amount of free time. The upside was that now I was discovering stocks that I would've previously been overlooking/missing. A human is rate limited by how fast they can parse and understand information, whereas a computer can operate at exponentially faster speeds.

It became something that I wanted release when I realised that we were heading towards a pretty bad recession and that a lot of people would be struggling to make ends meet. I had this tool that I used to make more money than my salary and a lot of people could potentially make use of it with some knowledge of how to invest.

I figure that it either works out and I'm able to support myself with this or it doesn't and I close it down and go back to using it myself.

I created NewsReadery because I wanted to help bring more exposure to indie content creators. With search engines and news aggregators all pushing the same major media publications, it makes it difficult for indie content creators to reach readers and, just as important, it makes it hard for readers to find interesting content.

Most importantly, I wanted to create a service where readers have complete control over the content they see and do not see.

<a href="https://www.plurisistemas.com/discador-automatico/">discador automático</a>