Ideas Thread (December 2016)
Hello, I couldn't find the thread for this month so I created it !
Reposting the previous description :
Choosing an idea is the most important single decision you'll ever make for your business, and it's no easy task. So every month on the Indie Hackers forum, we have an ideas thread where we help each other out!
If you need help coming up with an idea, if you have ideas to share, or you'd like feedback on an idea you're considering, leave a comment below!
If you'd like to look back at other ideas, check out these previous threads:
One place music diffuser - As a musician, I often struggle to gather feedback from my new tracks/ideas. The platform would allow a band/musician/producer to submit a track in multiples places at once (/r/musiccritique, socials networks or submithub) and monitor the feedback
Very similar to what I did with RapPad.co, except that was only for rap music.
Have you seen SubmitHub by Jason Grishkoff? It's very similar to this idea, although I believe it costs a small amount of money to use. There could be some inspiration there!
I think there is still so much money on the table with digital assistants. I'm talking without any deep learning; purely with voice recognition, voice synthesis and a whole lot of functionality in between.
I went to an all day robotics talk on Pepper (the robot), which has an open platform for developers with IU functionality for non tech people. They're still just doing the simulation of AI (is this called VI?).
I don't think the digital assistant needs a personality, and I don't think it's impossible to make a digital assistant on an app with more functionality than Alexa - and the phone native options - on an indie budget. I think most of the battle is packaging it correctly and knowing what to focus on.
Other than that, automation is still 90%+ on the table even with current tech. Here it's very much about picking a niche. Retail stores like Target, Walmart and Safeway still do manual isle counts. This can be done with basic computer vision that matches barcode to item, and outputs the number of items into the inventory management software. This will give large chains the kind of holistic view of what's selling that they've never had from low paid labor.
Also my friend was working at a small company that processed health insurance claims. Apparently her entire job was basically copy/pasting info into a spreadsheet. It's insane the amount of jobs like this. A small firm (even consisting of one person) can make big moves if they know where to look.
Thanks for making the thread, Sladix! I usually post it around mid-month, which is why you haven't seen it yet, but I figured that eventually someone would get tired of waiting and post it near the beginning of the month :-)