Finally ready to put myself on the spot.
Hi guys, I'm from Helsinki.
For years, I've been coming up with ideas for startups (I walk around with an idea notebook in my pocket) but I never really worked on any of these ideas. I always come up with a hundred 'good' reasons why not to pursue my ideas but now I know I was just controlled by the fear of failing and being criticised. Now I've decided to come out, share and learn. I believe there's no better community to start with than Indie Hackers.
So, here I am and ready to build a bunch of little digital things. The first thing I'll be working on is a bot that university students can talk to to find out general info around campus, i.e. opening times of library, bus schedules, lunch menus, cool events, etc. The idea is that the user talks to the app instead of Googling. Based off of AWS tools.
I'd appreciate some feedback already at this stage and if interested to partner, shout out. Happy to be here.
Good luck! Many people have ideas but never put themselves out there. Tell your family. Tell your friends too. When it's "out there" then you'll find that you will hold yourself more accountable.
Thanks a lot! My family (wife) is anti-entrepreneurship and shoots down pretty much every idea I run by her. But I'll start talking to friends and other people too.
Thanks again!
Nice idea!
I see potential for that!
Obviously there are already idk howmany of services offering bots, but specific for universities probably not.
Next step I guess would be to talk to a (or multiple) university, and ask why they don’t already have a bot.
When they say we can’t use those services because of x and y then you know what to do! (Not likely tho)
Or they can also say they never thought of that. Most likely they can just as easily use another bot service. In that case it’s all about the marketing and getting known by universities. (A little bit more likely)
The most important reason probably is the gain vs costs. The costs might be pretty high and what would be the gain exactly? Is it simpler? Is it faster? That’s something you need to think about, what problem do you solve? In what way is your bot better then others for universities? (Likely)
I think you probably already thought about some features that universities would love to have that other bots don’t offer, those could be another reason for universities to buy your service.
PS, I would definetly search for some content on how to turn your idea into something real, lot’s of great stuff is there on the web and here waiting to be found!
I wish you the best!
Thank you so much for your feedback.
I definitely have a long way to go. I've put a lot of effort in differentiating my service from what's already there. From the little research I have done, a couple big universities in my city do not have any similar service but I never went as far as asking them why (thanks for the tip).
On monetization, my idea was to charge an advertising fee. All content featured on the service (schedules, lunch menus, etc) is paid for. But I think I need to come up better monetizing plans.
Of course, all this is still at idea stage. My next move is to figure out how to move from here. Lot's of Googling to be done.
Thanks again!
You will get there, as you said it is only an idea yet and ideas can be changed:)
It’s good to know who you customers are (which you know).
Then ask yourself why would those customers chose my service?
Then ask yourself how much is it worth for the customer. (This is hard tho)
What always helps for me is creating a sentence (or header of your future website) that describes the problem that you solve for the customer. (Like: Tired of searching for days just to get the right software tools you need for your company? We got you within one day! (Button) Find tools)
(Idea for people that are searching for an idea haha)
I basically described the whole idea, the customer and what problem I solve for the customer. If you try to do that aswell it is crystal clear what you have to do! From there one you can look at how you will solve those problems, what the costs are etc etc.
Good luck!
And most importantly have fun aswell;)
Your feedback has given me a lot of ideas on how to get started. Thank you very much.