How to find your next side project

3 min readNov 21, 2018

Photo by Christopher Machicoane-Hurtaud on Unsplash

We all know how important is to work on side projects for your skills, professional and personal life.

People want to start these side projects but often they get stuck thinking too big. They want ideas that are original, big or never been tackled before by other companies.

That’s not always the case while working on side projects.

Photo by Guilherme Vasconcelos on Unsplash

You don’t always need an original idea.

You are not starting a company.

You are just building skills.

But, how can you find what to work on your next project?

These some 5 ways to find ideas for your project:

Scratch your own itch

Have you been thinking to the same idea for weeks or years? Did you find an app that you feel it could been done better? Did you stumble upon something and you ask yourself why that service does not exist yet?
Scratching your own itch is one of the best way to find side projects that you will enjoy working on.

Talk to people

Ask the same questions above to people around you. Friends, family, co-workers, classmates. They will have different problems in their lives and you will get some many interesting ideas you could work on while impacting on other people’s lives.

I would suggest you to read How to get Startup ideas by Paul Graham.

Evaluate your day

Write a diary of all the things that you do during your day. What could be done better?

What are you struggling on?

What would you like to add to your day but you always forget?

Answering these questions could give you some good ideas.

Browse sites

Browse sites like SHOW HN, ProductHunt and Github.
You will find interesting product that you could do better or product that are missing some cool features.

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Visit ProductHunt for finding inspiring ideas (https://www.producthunt.com)

Experiment

While you explore these sites, try to think how you could create these products in emerging platforms like Amazon Alexa or with a chatbot.

I am sure there are other ways to find ideas, but ideas have no value if you don’t execute on them.

“Ideas are valuable if you execute on them”

But ideas have no value if you don’t execute on them.

Author

Domenico is the founder of Stooic Labs. If you need help with software development, you need consultancy for your technical challenges or you need a CTO on-demand, or need help with your marketing strategy, feel free to contact me at domenico@stooic.com

He is a developer since 15 years and that’s his first passion.

Domenico Solazzo is also the author of ZeroTo10. He writes on tech, how to build software products, how to manage engineering teams and much more.