Help with idea validation
I've been thinking about building a journaling web / mobile app specifically focused on developing self-awareness.
Write one entry every day and get reports around overall sentiment trends, frequently mentioned topics, showing how your thoughts change around those topics over time and observe patterns.
I know there are quite a few journal apps around, but they're all pretty generic - I would personally use something like the idea above.
Appreciate any feedback guys, let me know what you think.
Thanks!
Check http://750words.com/
Is that something similar to what you had in mind?
Nice, I haven't seen this one!
Yea, that's pretty close to what I'm thinking.
I guess it's nice to see that the concept is viable and people are willing to pay $5/month for it.
If I differentiate myself somehow, you think I can still pull it off?
I think there's always a chance, as long as you position yourself differently.
Write down different potential target customers for this product and what problems are they trying to solve. Then see which audience 750words is focused on and figure out if you can focus on a different niche with a different problem.
Makes sense, thanks for the help Matis!
Not sure I follow what you mean by 'frequently mentioned topics'. Could you elaborate a bit?
It's an interesting premise. Just having a hard time visualizing the data inputs.
Thanks for jumping in Anthony!
I wasn't very clear on those points, but essentially I mean doing Natural Language Processing on the journal entries of users to extract recurring themes and sentiment data around them.
I would have to come up with a few meaningful insights I can extract with machine learning, with the goal of helping users understand themselves.
For ex. if I keep mentioning my job in my journal it would be picked up by the AI as a topic and I would be able to see how my attitude and sentiment changed around it over time.
You think that would be useful to people?
Got it. Sounds a lot like entity recognition for journal entries if I'm following right.
I think it's a novel idea!
Monetizing may be tricky. On the one hand, this data could be a treasure trove for advertisers. However, there's some ethical problems to navigate as journals can be quite personal. Especially with the flak Facebook has received in recent months. Conversely, charging users begs the question how many folks are willing to pay for it for the business to be sustainable. Depending on your angle, that probably merits a market test to see if your assumption(s) holds water.
I'm in a bit of a similar boat in vetting assumptions for a fledgeling B2B product. From what I've read, landing pages are a common angle. And advertising campaigns to see what keyword combinations resonate with users. Full disclosure, I've not attempted either yet for my use case; but plan to do so soon.
Thanks, that's really helpful!
Yea, I would hope I can charge for it, just need to figure how to bring the most value.
I'll probably put together a landing page and run some FB Ads.
Appreciate the help and good luck with your project!
You're welcome. Best of luck to you as well!
It sounds interesting, I think there's some value in it, but I think it would be very hard to monetize, consumers like to pay for things like that (I own a note taking app with tens of thousands of signups).
I think mobile app would probably be the right platform for this as well as you can more easily send notifications to remind people to use, and atleast force some monetisation upfront with initial app payment.
Thanks for the feedback!
Is your note taking app free to use?
I would personally be willing to pay like $5 a month for something like this, hopefully there's a couple thousand people around who would as well.
Yes app is free to use, but some competitors have been around for a while and don't seem to have gotten far, even with paid plans, so have not invested the effort in extra features to monetize.
I think what you can get here is feedback.
If you want validation I would suggest building a landing page and sending some traffic to it to see how it converts.
You're right Daniel, I meant feedback :)