I think the main direction of $$$K dollar ideas are those in the area of consulting, do those count? It can scale well beyond that, but at that point you're an agency.
I believe that coming up with product ideas that can work at the indie level (bootstrapped/without raising millions) is a matter of training, validating the idea is the hardest part (and not falling into the trap of building it first). The main target of those ideas is often something that can sustain you with under a hundred customers, which rules out building a new social network.
One idea I had recently is on the edge of consumers and businesses: it might make sense to have groupon-like websites for niches. These could be geographical, or around a certain activity. For instance if you are into craft beer, why not create a "deal" website for it? Call up shops that sell brewing equipment, walk in to local bars and ask if they would like to come up with some craft beer tasting event. The model is here that you get a kickback if people take you up on your offers. The more niche the better.. It could be as specific as "young parents who love craft beer and live in New York". That sounds like it could be in the 100k range.
A small plug, for fun I've been writing up some ideas that fit this description [0].
I’m the co-founder of Friendly Captcha [0], we offer a proof of work-based captcha since two years or so. Happy to answer any questions.
A big part of what makes our captcha successful in fighting abuse is that we scale the difficulty of the proof-of-work puzzle based on the user’s previous behavior and other signals (e.g. minus points if their IP address is a known datacenter IP).
The nice thing about a scaling PoW setup is that it’s not all-or-nothing unlike other captcha’s. Most captcha’s can be solved by “most” humans, but that means that there is still some subset of all humans that you are excluding. In our case if we do get it wrong and wrongly think the user is a bot, the user may have to solve a puzzle for a while, but after that they are accepted nonetheless.
While your service is of high quality, the pricing is completely unreasonable for private use cases, many times higher than hosting the site in the first place.
I think the it depends on what counts as a "request" in terms of pricing. Is it only successful checks? Pricing would be fine then. If it also includes failed checks then there is no point in the service, including the Advanced plan. Would eat through the entire credit in a day.
I'm sorry to hear that. We offer free and small plans for small use-cases, but I also understand that some projects don't have a budget at all.
There is a blessed source-available version of the server that you can self-host [0]. It is more limited in its protection, but it is probably good enough for hobby projects.
Friendly Captcha | Backend and DevOps Engineers | REMOTE (EU) | FULL-TIME, PART-TIME or FREELANCE | Munich, Germany | https://friendlycaptcha.com
At Friendly Captcha we do one thing and we do it well: we protect websites from malicious actors and bots. We are building privacy-friendly and accessible anti-bot solutions that don’t annoy users with tasks like clicking fire hydrants.
We’re a small, growing, profitable company. Our revenue mostly comes from medium to large German-speaking enterprise and governments.
We aim for reliability and simplicity in our stack - and the same goes for our engineering. You can work fully remote or from our Munich office, anywhere between 3 to 5 days per week.
You might like Starboard Notebook (https://starboard.gg), it's in-browser and mixed multi-language, as well as diffable/version control friendly. (I'm building it).
I didn't want to have any free tier (for now), but also it wasn't worth my time to actually implement payments until I had enough users - a point it didn't reach.
So every user was in a trial that never expired, despite what it said on the frontpage.
Half a year back or so I built a mini SaaS product that failed, now I'm in the process of open sourcing it so that everybody can freely host it for themselves. Here's the project homepage https://magiclogin.net, it was/is transactional e-mails and e-mail authentication as a service.
Getting it ready for open sourcing is a lot more work than I anticipated, I don't want to just dump it in a Github repo and have nobody be able to actually use it, so I'm making deployment easier and writing docs on how to run it yourself.
I didn't build the project to make money necessarily, it was mostly a learning project. That doesn't mean that I didn't hope it would be at least moderately succesful financially. But it was a case of "build and they won't come" and my other projects took off much more so I couldn't justify trying to market/pivot it. The final nail in the coffin came when I received a cease and desist letter because apparently a vc-funded auth provider trademarked the term "Magic Login".. So yeah..
It was a lot of work but I now have a small stream of people who contact me every so often about it.
BTW, you seem like a smart guy and I am looking for someone to work with me on a relaunch of the project as a paid product. I have learnt a lot in the years since my first attempt so I think I have a pretty decent chance of success this time round.
This is pretty useful as a product, and magic.link has been a hit and miss experience for me. Where will you post/announce the open source version? I’ll definitely check it out!
What I constantly ran into was disconnecting from the server I was connected to and wrangler not being able to handle that. At the time I had a somewhat spotty connection (nothing terrible), but it made wrangler dev very painful - so much so that I ended up writing my own node.js wrapper around it for local development. The lock-in to webpack also isn't great when I am nowadays accustomed to esbuild which is so much faster.
Ohhh I remember this too, I hated how it consistently dropped connections. A community member fixed this for us (here https://github.com/cloudflare/wrangler/pull/2008) so that it transparently and automatically reconnects now and the experience has gotten so much better.
And of course, miniflare reduces even the chance of that to zero :)
We also don't have a lockin to webpack anymore (you can choose custom builds with the "javascript" type, which I admit is a little confusing). We're going to move away from even this dependency and make everything much faster and lighter, stay tuned.
I've faced this too, where you'll save, then hit refresh, and it show the previous version; despite the fact that we "know" that the code is changed. SO we should be able to queue requests when we have a new version uploading (and of course, make the whole thing faster). Thanks for your feedback!
My personal site does the job (https://guido.io), it lists some old and current projects and it allows me to post some snippets of knowledge every now and then as a blog. There are a hundred ways I want to improve it, but it is rarely at the top of my priority list.
I started with just some HTML and CSS, and later shoe-horned it into a Hugo template which required some awful custom theme hacks.
> But I'm also curious about what stack was used to make your site. I've looked at static site generators, but none I found felt right to me. I guess it's one of those cases where if there is no clear winner, then the problem hasn't really been solved yet.
It's fairly simple to create your own static site generator in any programming language with different tradeoffs, I think that is one of the main reasons why there are so many out there. It's about the content and your visitors won't care which framework you used anyway - so just pick one and be done with it. You can port your content over if you ever want to switch.
I believe that coming up with product ideas that can work at the indie level (bootstrapped/without raising millions) is a matter of training, validating the idea is the hardest part (and not falling into the trap of building it first). The main target of those ideas is often something that can sustain you with under a hundred customers, which rules out building a new social network.
One idea I had recently is on the edge of consumers and businesses: it might make sense to have groupon-like websites for niches. These could be geographical, or around a certain activity. For instance if you are into craft beer, why not create a "deal" website for it? Call up shops that sell brewing equipment, walk in to local bars and ask if they would like to come up with some craft beer tasting event. The model is here that you get a kickback if people take you up on your offers. The more niche the better.. It could be as specific as "young parents who love craft beer and live in New York". That sounds like it could be in the 100k range.
A small plug, for fun I've been writing up some ideas that fit this description [0].
[0]: https://indieideas.substack.com/archive?sort=new