💡 Ideas Thread 💡

if you know something really well teach it to people. then productise it

• Makerpad - Ben tossell teaching people no code
• Level up tuts - Scott Tolinski teaching code
• Design Acadeny - Laura Elizabeth teaching design
• Marketing Examples - Me teaching marketing
• Sales For founders - Louis teaching sales ...

I had a few thoughts recently on idea generation while I was thinking about things in the shower.

1. My number 1 rule to come up with new ideas is pick problems you have yourself. I would much rather be building something that solves my own problems than to be working on problems that I don't fully understand.

2. It's age old advice to narrow down to a specific niche. One way to do that is to pick a broad idea and really focus it down to a very specific set of customers.

For example, let's say you're working on a "blog" engine. As a software engineer it's easy to go down the path of making a super generic blog framework that can be used by every man and his dog.

But what if you take the opposite approach? What if you make a blog engine specifically catering to the needs of YouTube gamer's that play Hearthstone? Programmers that code in C#? Personal Finance Gurus? Pixel Artists? Fitness experts?

I'm leaning on my own set of biases here, but the beautiful thing about this form of idea generation is that we all have our own different set of biases. Once you go down this path you start thinking, yeah, what if my blog posts could have working demos directly embedded into the page? Interactive tools to personalize the experience?

3. The last thought I had is taking a data first approach.

Many great websites are built on freely available data. What devices around your home can you extract the data from? What data do you create as an individual everyday? What computer games do you play that could be considered data heavy?

Did you know that some government organizations publish publicly available data everyday? What if you take this data and make charts and tables out of it?

Artiom's article here is worth a read, some cool ideas in there.

• Something more accurate and reliable than NomadList, perhaps even geared towards those traveling on the PanAmerican trip
• Photography service where you can scroll through Instagram accounts of photographers in a local area that you're traveling to and hire him/her for a photo shoot

I came across this sharing of ideas tweets - https://twitter.com/eu_frey/status/1213801853244313603

Also, in my local personal world, I'd love a WhatsApp type app to use that had some kind of organisation of discussions within threads. I wish there was a better way, most of the WhatsApp groups I'm on are really useful for communicating (more for personal stuff), but as soon as the group has more than 10 or 20 people it gets really annoying and hard to follow.

Thought of a small idea today.

Problem: When you're at work, you are probably creating documents and spreadsheets all day. If you're part of a team, it's hard to remember to make sure you're sharing everything you're creating.

Possible Solution: Something that looks at your document tools at the end of each day and gently reminds you to share the things you've been working on. It could be a Slack bot so you could hook up 1-click "share with team" or "never share" buttons for each doc. It could also generate a digest of all the content your team has been working on.

Maybe we could build it as a Tettra feature? 🤔