51–60 of 165 posts
Cynically, this post could have been: “you aren’t going to work on that potentially lucrative or rewarding idea, stop hoarding it and give it to me.” Isn’t this also “I need a product-focused co-founder”?
1. Grep, but as a web service for RSS/Atom feeds. Allows to filter a feed based on search terms, or by author, or by length of post, etc.
2. A feed reader (as a web service and mobile app) that specializes on YouTube (etc.) videos, with current playback position sync and other video-specific features.
1. Write down the apps on your phone or computer that you use the most. If you want to bootstrap a profitable business, I recommend listing the apps you use for work. 2. Write down the one feature for each app that you use the most within that app. 3. Write down what slightly annoys you about that one feature 4. Build the product around the one feature you feel you can cook up quickly and that will benefit your workf…
My story. I used to use news API services for my side projects. One day, I realized that I can build my own service that will be both, best quality (like real multilanguage support), and cheap. 8 months into it, it is my full-time job and we are releasing our first paid version (post-beta). We have 600 subscribers (beta-testers) and some people claiming they will become paid clients. It is a huge experience in both,…
You could list things you are familiar with or use regularly and see if combining them in a novel way sparks the idea for an innovative product.
I've found one approach work very well with my mentees:
- Figure out which "special interest groups" you are part of beyond software engineering. That can be "aquarium owner", "coffee lover", "morning person", "diligent grandson" — the less technical, the better.
- Among these "niches", find the ones that could benefit from a transfer of technology, like (spitballing here) "teachers who work from home" (education niche) + "automated submission and pre-grading of homework" could work (digital document collection and rule-based checking logic), or "aquarium owner" + "nitrate cycle tracking IoT device" (hardware-enabled analytics) + "optimal light scheduling" (machine-learning-supported recommendation engine).
Do that for all the groups you're part of, and you will find lots of ideas that aren't just "scratch-your-own-itch". They are 'scratch-an-itch-you-understand-and-know-how-to-remedy'.
Basic idea, if my pet is lost, I open up your app, upload a few images of my cat and set a monetary reward. On the backend your neural net learns how that specific cat looks like, then other users of the app can snap pictures of random cats on the street and the app will tell them if that animal is lost or not. If someone snaps a picure of a lost cat, they'll get connected to the owner and the reward is transfered, the app can take a small cut of it.
Build an app for finding lost pets with facial recognition. Recognizing cats is the easiest thing for neural nets, yet I haven't seen it used for lost pets yet. Basic idea, if my pet is lost, I open up your app, upload a few images of my cat and set a monetary reward. On the backend your neural net learns how that specific cat looks like, then other users of the app can snap pictures of random cats on the street and…