Finding a new side-hustle

Building something that people use is really hard. Making someone find your product and convincing them to use it is a lot harder. I believe this is where the marketing and sales come in. I have built a few side projects like this one here and there. Hellokea is the one that I have spent the most of my time on a side-hustle. It’s complex. It has a few features that not many competitor products have in common. The hardest part for me is convincing people to use it. Of course, I still have to make the website richer and create videos for documentation. But, again, I am not sure whether it would make people use this product after hours of effort. I would consider myself to be a developer who doesn’t want to get involved in the marketing or sales side of a business. This is the part where most software developers or people trying to make a business fail. And, I am, for sure, in that group.

Breaking the barrier of expressing one’s thoughts in a clear and beautiful way would help one go further in the game of entrepreneurship. It’s hard. It requires a whole lot of dedication in time and energy. To make this work, I have initiated a set of cues as mentioned in Atomic habits. The first and foremost is writing and reading. Yes, these are the most crucial parts of conveying a message in an effective form. This site is purely for trying that out.

Next ?

Whenever I come up with an idea or after completing a product, I always have trouble marketing it. Marketing is a core part of any business, and social media platforms could emphasize that through the network effect. For a very long time, I have been curious about products like Buffer, ZShare and other social media publishing platforms, also called growth marketing tools. They are fantastic for marketers and businesses. I would like to build one purely as an extension for browsers. The idea is to trigger a popup anywhere in a tab so that I can post content to different platforms. I can assure you that this idea has been discussed online by different people in forums and on social networking sites. And, this is not new either.

Why would I like to build something which is tried, tested, and built by numerous companies and indie-hackers? This is something that’s stopping me from starting this project. As any software developer would do, I have registered a domain first. Should I proceed? or discard these thoughts? I’m not sure. Before beginning this one, I would like to have a bit more clarity on a few things.

1. Market research - Should I really build this tool after all?
2. If I proceed, where do I start? Mostly with the extension part, I guess
3. Shouldn’t I use this to opportunity to learn new stuff like Typescript and React (new to me ;) ). ( I am more into vanilla js and vue)
4. How am I going to market this? Having a website and SEO would be a good start. This tool would help me with marketing.
5. What platforms should I integrate? What features should I implement ? The tools out there have numerous feature.

These are some questions that have been bugging my mind for quite some time. I have to study a bit more about the market and list all the features that would help an individuals / indie-hackers use it on a day-to-day basis. I am tired, and really want to build something that’s going to be useful.