The Best Side Projects Solve a Problem Only You Noticed
Most advice about side projects tells you to go find a gap in the market. Look at what people are complaining about, what’s trending, what’s missing. Honestly, that’s fine advice if you’re building a startup. For a side project, I think it’s kind of useless.
The best side projects I’ve come across — mine included — didn’t start with any research at all. They started with someone getting mildly annoyed by something so small they’d feel a little silly complaining about it out loud.
The annoyance nobody talks about
Mine was this: every single time I opened a new browser tab, there’d be this half-second where I was just staring at nothing before I typed whatever I was searching for. Doesn’t sound like much. But do that fifty times a day and it adds up to a surprising amount of blank, wasted attention. Nobody writes articles about this. There’s no subreddit dedicated to “new tab pages are kind of a waste.” It just bugged me.
So I made something small. A browser extension that shows a verse from Surah Yaseen — a chapter of the Quran a lot of people come back to again and again — in Arabic, Urdu, and English, right there on every new tab. That’s it. Not a startup, not even really a “product.” Just a fix for five wasted seconds that I decided deserved something a little more intentional than nothing.
Why “only you noticed it” is kind of the whole point
Here’s the thing about big, obvious problems — someone with way more time and money than you is already working on them, or about to. But those tiny, personal, “why does this specific thing bug me and seemingly nobody else” annoyances? Nobody’s fighting you for that territory. Nobody else has your exact itch.
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It also makes the project way easier to actually finish, which I think is underrated. You’re not trying to win a market or hit some growth number. You’re just trying to make one small thing less annoying, for yourself, specifically. “Done” means “I stopped noticing the annoyance,” not “we hit 10% market share.” That’s a much easier bar to clear, and I think that’s exactly why these projects tend to actually get shipped instead of dying in a folder somewhere.
It really doesn’t need to matter to anyone else
This is the part I think people get backwards. There’s this assumption that a side project only “counts” if other people use it too. But some of the best, most satisfying little projects out there are useful to exactly one person. You.
If other people happen to find it useful, great, that’s a nice bonus. But it’s not the point, and honestly it was never the plan. Mine ended up open source and free for anyone who wants it — partly because putting something out publicly keeps me honest about actually finishing it, and partly because if a few other people also have that same five-second gap in their day, maybe it helps them too. But that’s a side effect. It got built because something small bothered me, and I had the ability to fix it.
So, if there’s a takeaway here
Stop waiting around for a “real” idea. Next time something tiny and specific bugs you — something you’d hesitate to even bring up to a friend because it sounds so minor — pay attention to that. It’s usually a better signal than any amount of market research, because it means you’ve found a problem with exactly one qualified person available to solve it. You.
If you’re curious what came out of my own version of this, the source for my little Quran-reflection extension is open on GitHub, and the verses themselves are pulled from SurahYaseen.pk.
