What is your "I wish I had invented that"?
I often see a product and think "This is amazing idea, why I didn't think of that"?
One example is Slack. Corporate communication is a huge market, and before Slack, there wasn't really a modern solution. Slack brought channels, bots, integrations, and slick UI under one product. Nowadays many people start to drop Slack and move somewhere else, but at that time it was truly a revolution in messaging and communication.
Do you have that thoughts from time to time? If yes, about what?
Flappy Bird.
Any real product, you can still invent and build. So might as well go for a one-hit wonder / lucky break.
I've not had this experience. Most of my regrets are ideas of my own that I believe could have been successful, I just never executed on them.
Hopefully that will change soon. The next couple months mark some huge transitions in my life, one of which is graduating with my bachelor's. Once every waking moment isn't consumed with school I hope to launch my side hustle.
Transferwise.
Indie Hackers :D #truth
Things like Slack and Stripe, I'm very glad they are around, but don't think I'd ever want to be responsible for building them.
Me neither. There are a lot of great websites out there that would've been cool to have invented, but I'm glad I don't own a company that's so big as Slack or Stripe.
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite.
I consider it one of the most innovative item there is.
Slack wasn't the first of its kind. Slack was just an iteration on previous products that came before it. The takeaway is not what you wish you had invented, but what you could've improved on.
Workflowy. Like for real that shit changed my life.
Looked into it and... the whole homepage is a login screen? workflowy.com
I don't remember what the login screen looks like as I'm permanently signed in. It's essentially a note taking app that is structured as a set of infinitely recursive lists. So there is no rigid hierarchy defined and you can structure your knowledge according to how your brain organizes things. I'm using it to take notes on everything I read as well as jot down things that occur to me throughout my day and study various topics/collect quotes.
Appsumo or help a reporter out
Had the same over HARO a few years ago. It was just a few email lists
Here is some product I'd love to have built my self: Pocket, Baremetrics, Mailbox, Product hunt, Onewheel and many more!
Services like baremetrics and chartmogul. The ability to just have instant value to your users by just plugging in your app! I'm always on the hunt for ideas like that!
I'm sure they have many other problems like "switching costs" but hey, that grass looks pretty green from here!
I'm sure @Shpigford could spend hours listing challenges and hurdles, but yes, having that one click ➡️ massive value first user experience is pretty great.
Instant-data-source is a huge win for sure.
That being said, there are a ton of downsides to relying so heavily on another platform as the primary data source.
Was a great way to get the product up and running, but a few years in it's been a hindrance to growth and something we're actively looking to expand outside of.
A little bit about the sharing economy, as soon as I saw Uber I thought about the same could be done with hotels(AirBnB), I always knew regulations would be complex for both, but it's obviously a huge market.
But my biggest "I could've done that" was Instagram, I thought it was cool when I first saw it, it was way simpler than today and was really just a timeline with images and really simple filters that you learn how to do in image processing classes if you major in CS, which was a cool idea because it helped with the fact that phone cameras back then weren't very good yet, so it adds an aging artsy feel to your photos and makes people more willing to share them.
What I didn't understand well back then is how much people value visual communication way more than written and how Instagram was poised to be just as big as Facebook.
Nowadays I rarely think, "I wish I had thought of that". I used to think that way with Facebook or Twitter, but ... I also wasn't very interested in computers at the time -- had gone back to school for psychology. Later on... when I couldn't really get any job in my field, I turned to what I was good at .. and never left.
Instead, I take a look at something and think, "Do I have the passion to improve upon this? Could I make it better? Could I make it cost less and still reap in some profit?" I create "alternative solutions" and I suppose that is the beauty of capitalism... with the freedom of having choices.
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