1. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. https://getlatka.com

2. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value.

3. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it.

4. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers.

I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck!

Couple of other thoughts -- your problems are likely not to be technical. They're going to be obtaining domain knowledge, marketing, and supporting your product.

I'll second the recommendation on "Start Small, Stay Small". Also Eric Reis' "Lean Startup" and 37 Signals "Getting Real". The latter two were really helpful in getting my most successful project out the door and making money.

For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site.

Monetizing it is still an issue...

Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life.

I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren’t making money on it, versus building something brand new.

My question is on logistics: Adsense brings in a bit less than expenses. Many users have expressed interest in supporting the project financially. Any recommendations on services to let people do that? One person recommended Patreon but that seems more geared towards artists.

2. Looks for apps which are poorly-rated (< 4 stars). These are apps which serves an actual need, but whose execution is lacking.

3. Build polished versions of those apps.

2) Find Entrepreneurs that have had a couple of hits, and don't have the time or resources for small things. They'll more than likely just give you the idea.

3) Pick up freelance gigs and get an agreement that give you rights to the underlying code. (I.E. the unique combination of elements belongs to the client.) If you do enough of this you will start to find efficiencies. You will start finding ideas all over the place when you see how other people work.

4) Read a lot. But about niche things.

5) Read blog articles by Venture Capitalists/ Angels. don't work for them... but built the stuff that they want built.

Also... Please build a themeforest for Bulma. I haven't had time to do it and I hate working in Bootstrap.

What you are asking is similar to "I think I have learnt playing the keyboard well enough as an assistant in an orchestra, now how to create great music for ads or whatever to make some pocket money?".

This is a matter of creativity. The situation you describe is usually the other way around - people have ideas first and then learn whatever is necessary in order to realize their creativity, they don't start with a tool set and then look for ways to apply it. That is done by consultants. So may be you must become one?

Creativity can't be taught. No amount of tips is going to substitute for innate creativity, of any degree, because all tips are effective only when you have an idea to work with, which is the product of creativity. If you don't have it, in this case identifying a problem and imagining a suitable solution, just do what all/most successful companies do - copy, but add a tiny variation to claim that its different and your own.

All that said, my tip would be to keep eyes and mind open, and just build whatever you feel is right and release it. Do consider feedback but don't get discouraged by criticism. There are ample examples of how the most derided product ideas have ended up making quite a profit, not just in software, although luck had a major hand in their success.

The biggest issue for me was finding a suitable developer who is willing to grow the one ore another project together with me. So if any of you guys is interested in a marketing partner and willing to invest his time into a project and split the revenue, i would be happy to get in tough with you.

Now let´s come you back to your question - how to come up with an idea? I will discribe you my way:

note down every "problem" somebody is telling you. No matter if it means "find the cheapest flight price", "would be cool if tool X could do Z" or if somebody tells you a terrible workflow within his company. In addition to that, we are all surfing the web all day long, so simply also note down things you like somewhere, and make screenshots / screencasts, if something is really great.

when you do this some days / week, you will generate hundreds of cool ideas within a very short period of time. but the idea itself is worth nothing at all. the idea itself is just an idea.

Collect stories and examples of successful side projects that resonate with you. (You can start by searching HN. This gets talked about a fair amount here.)

Also, collect your ideas and start fleshing them out.

Also, collect information on how small side projects get monetized.

Find these big, ugly, shared spreadsheets and turn them into webapps.

As for good ideas, that’s the tricky part. Look around and open your ears... sorry for not letting you know of my exit plan idea ;-)

I'm going to suggest an alternative method that has worked for me.

Start with the money.

If you want monetization to be guaranteed you need to prioritize that first.

Take this method and rinse/repeat for you and your skills.

1) How much do you really want to make from this a month, what would make you happy?

Let's say you decide $1k a month would make it worth it after time, expenses and payment processing fees.

2) You then decide how many customers you really want to have to find and how much support email you want to answer.

Usually developers pick prices like $6 and wonder why no-one buys. This low price screams a lack of confidence in the product. That you aren't taking it seriously. That you may not be around in 8 weeks.

Starting without monetization in mind or equally, pricing low is the death of a product because for someone who dislikes marketing you just set yourself a huge marketing mountain to climb.

At $6 each, finding and selling to 150+ customers - when you don't even have one yet is a huge trek to your $1k happy place.

Let's say you feel more confident about finding and serving 10 customers really well. That seems achievable, right?

So with just 10 customers we're looking at a $100 a month product, right?

Whoa, you're thinking you could never build something that's worth that much.

Maybe you're worried it's enterprise level costs now and that's not the type of product you want to build.

Don't worry, a $100 product can be really simple.

Often developers think that a big cost means solving a big problem and that a big problem needs a big solution. Not true at all.

A big problem can be solved with a small elegant solution.

3) Now we know how much we want to make and how many customers we need and how much we are going to sell it for.

We now need to find the problem we are going to solve.

So how big of a problem needs a $100 per month solution?

Not very big at all really.

Let's say a business owners time is super-conservatively worth $50-$100 an hour.

So to add value, we are looking at saving someone between 2-4 hours a month on a task they normally have to do manually. That's not too bad!

Or maybe you want to help them reduce their business costs by $200-$400. Also, very possible. Now we have the value proposition.

We know what kind of problem we are looking for, so value will be clear for the customer.

4) Now we decide _who_ this is going to be for.

Don't pick people the same as you. They have the same skills and can solve the same kinds of problems that you can.

Pick a group of people :-

- That are easily identifiable by what they call themselves on social media (blogger, podcaster, videographer, designer, public speaker etc)

- Make sure they are a group you like interacting with, that you have some experience of working with already in some way (please pick a group you like and care about)

- Make sure they are the decision maker in their own business (don't pick employees of big corps)

- What tech skills have you worked with that overlaps with this customer group?

Let's say you've worked on a few video platforms in the past so you know that space well, so you choose to help YouTubers.

5) What is the issue that we are solving?

Ok, so now we're helping YouTubers to either save 2-4+ hours a month or reduce costs by $200+ - for your $100 MRR product.

This is where we breakdown what it takes to run their business.

What stops them being more profitable?

What tasks do they do everyday?

What can be automated?

What do they hate doing in their business?

If you know this space even a little, you will have answers here.

Maybe video storage is a huge expense.

Perhaps running their community takes up too much time so they can't scale.

Is just publishing a video end to end super time consuming? Look at why.

If you don't know what matters to them, ask. Make a hypothesis and see if it's true.

In just a couple of DM's you might find that they spend a whole day a week on something repetitive. Or are spending money on something that you can optimize. Write a few possibilities down.

6) Make an offer

In just a day or two you can go from no idea, to identifying a significant pain point for a group of people that's easy to reach.

Now you consider a couple of small technical solutions for the problems you've found.

You go back to a couple of your ideal customers and make them a proposition.

Something like - "You said you spent X hours on this particular problem. If I built something to solve that, this week, would that be worth $100 to you?"

If it's a huge pain point they will bite your hand off. If you get weak responses - no worry, you've not built any code yet. You can use the conversation to get to a deal.

They might say it's worth less so you find out what features would be needed to make it worth the $100.

Maybe they suggest a different problem that is more urgent for them.

After a few conversations you should have at least a couple of paying customers and a clear solution.

8) Building

Now you know exactly what you need to build and have customers waiting. There is no excuse but to launch. This will help you focus on the truly essential code.

As you build, reach out to a few more potential customers. (we made sure they were easy to find earlier) Ask them if they have the same problem. Show them what you have.

Go through a few cycles of building and feedback. Make sure people are paying you what you set out in the beginning - or close to it.

Ask your starting customers for referrals. You'll reach your 10 customers with zero marketing spend.

You then have all of the elements needed to scale further if you wish!

Remember that code comes last in this method for a reason. Only build when you have paying customers.

My personal experience, I built a newsletter to a small size (800), took about year to do this so I definitely didn't scale out very fast by any measure.

Either way I did reach a point where I was able to get a few hundred bucks per month in sponsorship. The time I put into it though didn't get the returns I needed to keep going at it so I've put it on hold and am not making any revenue now.

It's one of those challenges where I believe I need to put a lot more time & money into it, take a risk and see if I can grow that revenue to a few thousand per month so that my time has better return. At a few hundred bucks it's not a passive income generating project.

I thought this would be a good story to share because in thinking about what could make you a few hundred bucks, it would be good to define how you get there. Building a SAAS product takes a ton of time upfront, and a few hundred bucks per month won't be enough to justify that time... but of course it's proof of a business model that can get to the thousands per month, and maybe more!

If it helps people then let them try it and pay what they want for it, which tells you how much you're helping based on how much they are paying.

how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side.

You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times.

I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life.

Sounds like you have already build something. Brush those up, make them available for the public and for the start don't think about how you will make money from those. You will get users and feedback. Those might help you in building something which will earn money.

There are different approaches to achieve this, but finding a technique that is both comprehensive enough and time efficient is the challenge.

This time around, I am trying to focus more on the marketing by using off the shelf systems and less on coding the site from hand.