I Open-Sourced All My Business Ideas

When I created my first company most people thought I was crazy when I told them my idea. It turned out to be a brilliant idea that worked very well but most people did not recognize it at the time, let alone put the resources to copy it...

In fact, because I was young and naive I was enthusiastic about it, but talking to people(specially experienced people) made you doubt in yourself.

Now I have friends that are also successful entrepreneurs, and it is a very common experience among us.

Now I don't talk with lots of people about my ideas, I don't want to argue or convince or whatever.This can make you to hang on on bad ideas by ego before they are tested. I just test them in the real world as fast as I can.

Most of them are not good once you test them, but thanks to them you iterate or discover good ideas.

Of all of those, code is probably the least important.

Effective marketing - which at the level you're talking about is easy to do with boilerplate copywriting, monkey spamming, and some SEO - is far better at dollar-for-dollar ROI than most unicorn ideas that need investors.

There's an entire subculture of shitty people running these shitty scammy "businesses" and sometimes cross-promoting each other. Unfortunately they really can be an easy way to earn money - if you have the ethics of a lizard.

But it highlights the fact that unless you're marketing products for developers, most customers don't care about code, or even about features. The vast bulk of any market, especially in the US, is full of people who care about making money with the minimum of effort and being attractive to the opposite sex. Any product that promises either or both has an immediate head start.

>While the dev who builds decent products is spending his free time thinking of the amazing features he's going to build and how much his users will appreciate them

Which I guess describes most people here. I know my default tendency is always to think: "idea = code + cool features + website/app"

But it's a really bad idea to confuse this with running a profitable business. Luckily I can indulge myself, but it's still useful to remember that the view from Customer Land looks nothing like the view from inside a Git repo.

Last year me a 2 of my friends sat down in a pub one night and did a brainstorming session for me (IT ideas) and 1 of the others (a writer - so story/article ideas).

We were trying to do the 100-10-1 process. Harder than it looks, but me and my other friend got 50 ideas each. Then over the next 2 days whittled it down to 5 ideas each to start work on. The 1 idea I am now concentrating on hits 19 of you points, and I am actually quite excited about it, especially as I will be the first power user, it scratches an itch for me.

I would like to see your list passed around some other successful people to see what they would add, and whether or not more items could be added, maybe including some negative items (ie if the idea hits this, minus a point from the score) . Then think about what the real number of points needed for a good idea should be. I am going to look back over my brainstorming list now and see how some of the other ideas score on you list.

Thanks for putting it together!