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Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#31

Post by mindcrime »

t0astbread wrote: post #12

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this as well recently. Especially your second major question: > If you completely don't have an idea, but want to work on one, how do you look for ideas? (But also the one before.) My line of thinking was there oughta be a community online where people can pitch their ideas and get opinions on it or look for collaborators, also cross-discipline. Like "hey I have this cool idea…

There are some sub-reddits that are sorta like that.

/r/SomebodyMakeThis

/r/somebodybuildthis

/r/stealmyidea

/r/startupideas

etc. come to mind.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#33

Post by tomcam »

I have endless ideas so I can’t address the second part. But for the first part, To me the most important book for this ever written is “The Mom Test”. It is the only search book written with methodical, repeatable, reliable steps to do this research. I warn you, implementing those steps will be damaging to your ego but may also make you wealthy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#35

Post by kazinator »

drtournier wrote: post #19

Some things that help me a lot: - Go walk outside - Consume media / go to events with topics that are VERY different than my field of expertise - Do any kind of art - Play like a kid - Last but not least, my favorite: Have a lot of bad ideas. https://seths.blog/2018/06/the-two-simple-secrets-to-good-id...

Your research grant application is approved!

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#36

Post by kickbutt22 »

I personally think that scientific papers offer a lot of good ideas. They will often talk about what useful applications that certain mathematical concepts have and the state of the art of what can be done with a certain technology, you will be amazed how many applications there are for something as simple as linear regression. A lot of the times they will outright publish open source libraries that have achieved state of the art performance in certain specific applications and can be integrated in your own product demo.

Also, watch some lectures (and do problems if you really want to understand the material) from MIT open courseware on challenging subjects like Linear Algebra or Statistical Inferencing. If you can combine fields from web crawling/page ranking and linear algebra (like Google did), you could have a really great idea.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#37

Post by michaelsalim »

My ideas are mostly things I need/want myself. So the first step is to find something that solves it. If it exists, great!

If it doesn't or if there's some pain points, I google about the topic and find out the important things about it. Depending on the field, this varies from blogs, youtube videos, research papers and press releases.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#38

Post by anitil »

drtournier wrote: post #19

Some things that help me a lot: - Go walk outside - Consume media / go to events with topics that are VERY different than my field of expertise - Do any kind of art - Play like a kid - Last but not least, my favorite: Have a lot of bad ideas. https://seths.blog/2018/06/the-two-simple-secrets-to-good-id...

I really like the idea of converting this from a problem of quality to a problem of quantity! I'm sure that in amongst a sea of terrible ideas you're bound to stumble upon some good ones, even if by accident

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#39

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

I've been running a problem validation platform for over 2 years just for this: https://needgap.com .

People post their problems, For which they haven't found a solution (or) when existing solution doesn't fulfill their needs i.e. need-gap.

You can check if any of the problems resonate with you and if it does you can choose to apply your skills to build a side-project which address that problem. The best part is you can get the feedback from those who want what you're building while building it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?

#40

Post by dontchooseanick »

Alan kay has a brilliant [0] powerful idea about ideas :

- Complete the sentence "It would be stupid if in 20 years we didn't have ..." (flying cars ? direct brain interface ? biological self-healing computers ? pick one)

- Now imagine this 'obvious' invention and bring it back into the present (IIRC he was trying to invent the iPad and came up with the Apple II - and succeeded. IIRC he's involved in Object Oriented Programming, Apple II, TCP-IP and other revolutionary inventions)

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_a_powerful_idea_about_ide...

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