Ask HN: Recently laid off developer looking for solo product ideas

11 thatgloomyguy 6 8/22/2025, 6:12:22 AM
I'm an experienced (10+) fullstack developer who was recently laid off and find myself at an interesting crossroads. Rather than immediately jumping back into the job search, I'm considering this an opportunity to explore building something on my own or working on exciting ideas that could turn into meaningful products. I am looking for I ideas for solo products that could be built and launched relatively quickly and problems worth solving that don't require a large team initially. Also looking for opportunities to collaborate on interesting projects with other developers. Have you built successful solo products? What problems are you seeing in your day-to-day work that could use better solutions? Any advice for someone making this transition?

Comments (6)

joshstrange · 1h ago
My preferred method of finding something to build (assuming I don’t already have an idea I’m passionate about) is to pair up with someone who has deep industry knowledge in a non-tech industry (or any industry I’m not well versed in). Take their knowledge with your skill set to create a tool/platform/whatever for the given industry.

I find that vast majority of people, even top people in another field, don’t have a good grasp of what is possible with technology. I don’t say that to make them sound dumb, just they don’t know what they don’t know. You get to be the one who can suggest technologies they can use, either existing things you can glue together and/or custom code to help accomplish a task.

haute_cuisine · 2h ago
Build only when you have unfair competitive advantage with finding customers for your service.
apwell23 · 2m ago
no one would build anything by this logic
CER10TY · 4h ago
Talk to people outside tech. Lots of small problems worth solving, but not in tech. Also, just because it's a problem in someone's day to day won't mean they'll pay to fix it.

Good luck!

muzani · 2h ago
"just because it's a problem in someone's day to day won't mean they'll pay to fix it."

The best way to measure is that they've hacked a solution themselves using inferior tools. This is where the 10x recommendation comes to mind - you can do it cheaper, faster, better.

georgestrakhov · 5h ago
I have way more ideas than I have time to build. Maybe we should talk. What is your preferred stack?