For side projects intended to generate income, base it on market research.
- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.
- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.
> If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
Just wanted to note that I make >50k/month, and this is the opposite of the approach that I've taken for about half my projects. I look for niches that I think will grow a lot, but which have no competition at the moment because the niche is so small. I build the site, SEO-optimise it, and then just leave it. I do this for lots of little niches that I think will grow, and about 1 in 5 take off. Some of my biggest sites didn't take off for years.
> No moat.
For my strategy building a moat is critical because I have way too many projects to keep on top of them and fight off competition that have a 1% better feature-set. The product should ideally get more useful "automatically" as it grows (e.g. user-contributed content, or something like that).
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My general advice: Learn basics of SEO, look around at what people want, build niche tools/things to help them get what they want. Keep repeating that and you'll eventually hit upon an idea that gets really big. Keep it simple (and cheap!) - a bunch of my projects that serve thousands of users per day run on Glitch and Replit (yes, really). Try to stick to project ideas that don't require much ongoing maintenance. There are likely many other good strategies - this is just my approach.
- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.
- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.
A great way to find these niches is through the "free tools" section of large websites. This means it's a niche they're using for lead gen and seo purposes. eg: https://www.shopify.com/tools https://www.wordstream.com/wordstream-graders https://www.hubspot.com/resources/tool