How did you come up with your idea?

Me1: "I know well how to code, but I have NO EXPERIENCE with mobile apps"

Me2: "So let's start with a simple idea, like a small silly app..."

Me1: "What do people like?"

Me2: "To drawwww!"

Me1: "Great answer 'Me2', you're so smart!"

Me2: "Oh stop it. You're also gorgeous."

Me1: "People also like the nature and the sea!"

Me1 + Me2 (although it's the same bloody person): "An app which let's you draw on the beach!"

Me1: "Sand Draw!"

Me2: "Ok, screw coding, now we need to head out to the beach and do some research..."

Me1: "Yes, naturally. You know Me2... I'm sure that one day they will call an important movement after your name..."

• 10 years & 10 million downloads later https://www.SandDraw.me is still my #1 app *

(That's the silly video on my silly story: https://youtu.be/J3dZ6Xop6G0)

Our idea was to create a Free Calendly alternative that humanizes scheduling with personalization features. Here is the link if you are interested in checking it out : https://zcal.co/.

How I came up with it?
1.) My co-founder and I were power Calendly users but their Free plan only gives you 1 active link with very limited features and paying for such a basic utility didn't feel reasonable.
2.) With the entire world moving to remote work culture, people started to seek more opportunities to humanize interactions, so we decided to bring personalization in scheduling workflow.

Link: https://chromeextensionideas.substack.com/

How I came up with the idea:

I was constantly seeing indie hackers coming up with ideas instead of solving existing problems. I'm solving that problem by serving existing problems with my newsletter that can be solved with a chrome extension.

I struggled with writing essays in school. Writing didn’t come naturally to me and I always procrastinated.

I came up with the idea to use music as an incentive to write. Typeboost was born. Typeboost plays music when you type to encourage you to keep tying. If you stop tying the music slowly fades away. I built it and it helped me quickly write my first drafts.

Link: https://www.typeboost.io

I created katlinks.io

I've been running my SEO agency for over a decade and I've seen many makers who don't do SEO because it seems complicated or expensive. So I decided to create an affordable and easy-to-use SEO tool.

I've always liked to make presentations. At school, at university. And once I came up with the idea of creating a company that makes presentations.

Since 2014 we've helped with creating eye-catching presentations for Salesforce, 3M, Philip Morris Ukraine, BAT etc.

Check out >> https://reprezent.us/pitch_decks/

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My idea was to create a simple way for people to donate to causes they care about:
https://www.pennyloafer.org/

How I came up with it:
My own giving habits felt really disjointed and reactive, and I talked with friends who felt similarly but didn't have a lot of time to research charities and issues. So I created a platform that makes it convenient to donate to things like climate change or mental health in an ongoing and strategic way - without having to do a lot of the leg work.

Product: Aquila[.]Network
I saw that the search quality on public search engines such as Google is degrading. This is mainly because more and more websites are moving behind paywalls + around 50% of information is now locked behind mobile apps. PageRank algorithm needs access to website content however, paywalls prevent this. So, I'm building an open search protocol + search service, that will encourage website owners to open up their searchable indexes to crawlers without exposing their content.

If you love reading stories, here's one I have for you: https://medium.com/@josejubin/the-brand-new-struggles-of-a-millennial-who-grew-up-with-the-open-web-the-story-of-aquila-network-4f85dbb8b332

Years ago I was building online stores for clients using OpenCart. The platform was fine but there was no way to remove the fields from product and category forms in the admin section so I constantly needed to tell clients which fields to use, which fields not to. That's not good both for clients and for me.

After some time I got fed up with all the tutorials for clients, so I built a plugin that would let remove any field or tab you don't need in the product form. Then I tried selling the plugin in the OpenCart store, and got my first sale in less than an hour. It was like adding petrol to a small fire - after that sale I built an entire line of similar products for the platform that would save time and simplify administration, and started selling them individually and in packs like this https://www.imakeitwork.net/opencart-productivity-pack .

The market for this kind of plugins in OpenCart is not large, but still all the plugins and packs made me few thousands with very little support needed for the clients (just made sure to code it with as little friction as possible). And I still sell few of the plugins every month without doing nothing, basically.

The idea for my climate change app came from a personal problem. I wanted to live a more sustainable life but did not know how. If you like podcasts, speak about it in more detail in this podcast episode

https://thursday.social/

As we decided to go remote, we were talking to lots of people from different companies to understand what works for them and what does not. We saw that everyone had great tools to make 'work' better but what about the connections between team members, the casual chats, inside jokes, lighter moments. We took these problems and tried breaking out of the zooom grid to create a virtual space for teams to bond and have fun.

Last year I quit my full-time job to focus entirely on my side projects.

My most selling product is an open-sourced JavaScript library called lightGallery.

I was getting visitors to my website from all over the world. But sales mainly were happening from the United States, Canada, and a few parts of Europe. Because the pricing was US-centric and people from other parts of the globe could not afford it.

To solve this problem, I started providing Purchasing Power Parity pricing. The results were excellent, and I started seeing more sales from countries other than the US. The Revenue share from countries with low PPP value has been increased by 250%.

I discussed this with a few other creators I Know and found out that the primary reason why people are not offering PPP is that there is no reliable tool that automates the whole process.

That is how I got the idea of parityDeals.

I wanted to come up with a problem to solve, so I decided to automate collecting problems to solve. When I was dealing with the solution, I figured out the other problems that people like me may struggle with too, e.g. market research, analyzing people's discussions, track relevant posts.
My product is about marketing research now.

I wanted a super quick and easy way to embed Airtable data directly on a website. Totally custom styles, no branding, no clunky iframes, I just wanted to get the raw data and be able to style and format it using HTML and CSS.

A quick search on Upwork also revealed that there were folks who wanted to selectively expose Airtable data in their websites and apps, and to allow people to submit data as well (which gets stored back in Airtable). Hell, there were some people that wanted a full app with Airtable as the functioning backend.

I discovered that there were a number of other solutions that did this for Google Sheets already. And I thought I could do things better. How hard would it be to build a service that could do this for both Airtable and Google Sheets?

Fast forward several months and https://sheetdream.io was born!

Simple. My partner and I built something that we would use. We are both filmmakers/writers and wanted something that would help us better plan our stories. When GPT3 came out, we realized that this was the perfect opportunity to build a tool that could help solve this issue. 10 months later we had our MVP built and are in the process of validating.

I'm currently designing an app that focuses on what some productivity apps don't do: focus on everyday people with everyday tasks. Not just focused on business goals. I got the idea that most people have a lot on their mind.

I want to make sure the app they use isn't going to get in their way to do important life tasks like going to the groceries, picking up kids, setting up personal time, building healthier habits, or paying bills while they're aiming to do things they actually want to do.

We're Formaloo 👋
My co-founders and I, are friends for more than 7 years. We always had a mutual vision: Empower people and businesses with knowledge-driven growth, and this vision assembled us around new software projects.

We were obsessed with automating our processes. So we developed a simple yet advanced form editor service to reduce our development time significantly. We shared it with our fellow developers and customers to use in their projects, and they LOVED it!

We continued using our form builder service and improved it along the way. Then we noticed people whom we don't know are using our API! We were surprised and decided to make a business out of it.

Eurotripr.com : I backpacked through Europe during college and became infatuated with traveling through Europe. I used to dream and obsess about running a European tour operator biz and be a tour guide leading groups through my favorite European destinations.

But my family and future wife were much more grounded than I am and made me realize it isn’t feasible to spend summers in Europe with strangers if you eventually want a family and stability. In my soul I knew this was not accurate but I also couldn’t imagine leaving my future family every summer. How selfish is that?

Also, although I was no stranger to the idea of solopreneurs and what would be later termed “indie hacking”, the tech wasn’t there (or I just didn’t really know enough about it) to build a digital tour empire. So I settled on teaching classes of wannabe travelers how to travel to Europe affordably.

Fast forward 20 years and the obsession is still strong but time is limited with family and (until recently) a FT job. However now it’s not only possible to more easily build a digital travel community and tour service, it’s even more acceptable to travel for long periods of time (thank you Pieter levels, nomads everywhere, and COVID).

My dream is finally possible and i can now create a thing that helps inspire people and give them confidence to travel to Europe, plan trips by themselves and with friends, talk with other European travelers, meet travelers in Europe, book tours, and so much more.

Even more than my own obsession with euro travel, I am a firm believer that if more people traveled internationally (especially from the US) there’s be a lot less xenophobia and hate in the world. I’d like to play my part in getting people out of their comfort zone and experiencing the great places and people in other parts of the world.

EDIT: and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also want to build something where I could be my own boss and have financial freedom while doing so.

I was thinking of my own skills, wanting to improve (do I have all of this right?), and thinking what's on the market.

There is no other comprehensive book like mine. Either you learn narrow domain (networking) or specific tools (Ansible), but not how to do everything including databases with a few lines of Bash.

https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

For a lot of time, I wanted to create a business that helps small business owners. A lot of my friends and family are small business owners. I have tried a few side projects around small businesses. It never came into an actual product due to a lack of time (I was a full-time employee).

The most serious was the time tracking mobile app that my wife used during her freelance work, but I always thought I wanted to help with something meaningful to the business side.

A few months ago, after quitting my day job, I talked with founders who tried some projects for small business owners. Also, I spoke with one of my previous bosses, the VP of engineering in a successful VC-backed company for small businesses.

Eventually, I concluded that business goals are in the heart of every small business, and now, with https://goalskeeper.io/, I am helping small business owners achieve their business goals.

I was doing freelance web development and was tired of getting bug reports as spreadsheets. It made for so much wasted time trying to update and keep in sync. I had an aha moment of sticky notes on a website and ran with it. PageProofer was the result https://PageProofer.com

My idea came from spending a lot of time sifting through crypto and blockchain news. So I decided to build my own simplified aggregator for news. Plan on adding more features, but so far have found it super helpful for myself.

Check it out and let me know what you think! blokfeed.com

Talk to people and ask your self about what problem could be fix or what technology could be improve. Take your time finding a killer startup idea. Note that isn't only the idea that make the company success but many other factor too. Don't reinvent the wheel, many successful companies aren't the first to use a technology. Think about this, who invest the fist camera, Nikon , Canon or Sony, it's probably non of them. they only took the technology and improve it.

our idea (https://datawiza.com) was from a conversation with our potential customers, who were complaining about their pain points to us. They told us they need several months of development work to integrate one web app with the cloud identity provider, like Okta, to enable SSO (Single Sign On). And they have 50+ apps to integrate!

Then we come up with a No-Code solution to solve such a problem!

I had a lot of customers in my previous business who struggled to understand SEO. So that pain became the foundation for our gamified SEO tool :)

I came up with https://hipe.link after my own experience with a loyalty card I used at my favorite supermarket. I get points whenever I shop but I have to wait for an entire year before I earn enough points to redeem them. I sometimes forget that I have the card with me. I though that there needed to be an instant solution where I can be rewarded every time I shop without the need to carry around the extra plastic.

This is going to be a boring one :), but my idea for the products that I sell came to me when I was doing AWS consulting. After 6 years I’ve interacted with lots of companies of different sizes, I did see what type of problems they have on a daily basis. For this reason I decided to build the most common products and sell them on the AWS Marketplace. Then after 3 years of doing this on the side, I decided to stop doing AWS consulting and focus on promoting this products full time, and see if I can pivot my company. This is what I sell: https://products.0x4447.com/

I haven't finished my project yet but my idea came up when I was learning english, I saw that there wasn't an app that would solve my problem, until I create it myself. (it is still in development)

I once came up with a business that I thought I would call Tiny Adventures. My plan was to set up a table on one of the busy nightlife corridors in my city, and then sell people the opportunity to play small games while they walked by with their friends. I was thinking of bobbing for apples, Bop It, Scrabble, and, perhaps, the opportunity to stage an improvised scene with handmade puppets.

This project never had a website. It never had a chance. But it does make me laugh when I think about it. And then I reflect on what an amaaaazing businessman I must be to have come up with that idea. 😂