Ideas Thread (November 2016)
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:
To kick things off, I'll share some entries from my personal list of ideas. I add pretty much any idea that comes to mind without much filtering, so my list has almost 100 items on it now of varying quality. For example...
I'm sure all of these ideas exist already in some form or fashion, but they're decent starting points!
I can chime in on what I've seen from idea 2. Not many courses out there, but it will definitely become more in demand, I want to learn VR game development! Besides udacity offering a course, I subscribe to Treehouse and they are pushing a lot of tutorials for unity and VR development. I would love to see if there is an opportunity to start a consulting business in VR and Mixed Reality, I plan on getting very skilled in this tech. I've also heard several times that people want a prototyping tool for VR and that does not exist, but with the rise of AFrame and WebVR that may soon change.
Udacity tends to be pretty light on substance but I'm sure it's a great start.
Pepper (the robot) is open to developers. There's an interface so you can play with a virtual Pepper robot available for download on their site. I went to an all day talk on it at Galvanize the other. They're doing a lot of these events in the Bay Area to see what people can come up with. One of the US leads for the company actually mentioned VR as a sector getting a lot of interest lately; saying that robots were likely more lucrative. I kind of agree. Just an FYI.
Small ecommerce management - In my country I see a'lot of people selling through facebook and instagram. They will usually post with picture and add their phone number for customer to order to them directly usually through whatsapp. Keeping track of their customer order and shipping can be a cumbersome task. I was thinking of providing solution for them to help manage their orders better. Kinda like Quotient but focus primarily on ecommerce.
Wouldn't using gumroad be okay? Etsy?
If you can sell it to small companies would be great. But what about Etsy or Shopify? Why is your idea different from those platforms?
Now, there is a buy button on Instagram and Pinterest as well.
Yeah small company and individual seller is what I was thinking. The target market I am referring to is people for one reason or another choose whatsapp for taking orders from their customer. I guess whatsapp offer a speedier respond than a normal website could not provide? But the problem I notice from them is taking and keeping track of all their orders can be a hassle. If I can provide a management system to help them simplify their process maybe they would pay? Honestly I dont know and are still doing research on it.
Yes, I agree. WhatsApp offers faster response than email or any other app does. I noticed small business tend to use WhatsApp a lot and I don't know how they manage to keep tracking of all their orders.
I think, if you simplify their work they will pay for it. But it is my humble opinion.
I think this is a great idea! :) I've watched my wife over the years do all kinds of stuff through instagram. It definitely seems like one of those twitter moments where it's like, give the users a platform and see how they use it.
Facebook groups is another one, but since I don't use fb, I'm not sure how or if they have any e-comm stuff on it. But I see my wife and people she talks to selling all kinds of stuff through both.
Thanks! Yeah they do sell using facebook groups. But the pattern is always similar where you need to contact them directly to take orders. At least that is what I observe in my country.
A few ideas, not very fleshed out but would love to hear some feedback.
Internal Happy Hour App - give employees and visiting, prospective employees input into drinks, snacks, music that will be at a weekly happy hour. Polls, voting, and feedback.
Project expertise hub - Allow companies to create chains of expertise for various projects. Avoid having to ask other employees how things work and who to talk to, the experts could provide notes and references for others to independently research before reaching out to expert for help.
HTML editing tool - I create a lot of HTML emails as a side gig, and there is often a long feedback process for editing these files and making the design look exactly right (most are converting pdf to html). Would be nice to have a place, with version control, where one side can comment on the appearance, and developers could edit HTML to match.
Also, I've been reading through a lot of the interviews here and they're amazing. Tons of great advice and consistent approaches to pull from founders. I'm planning to do some more focused brainstorming now, beginning with hackernews and reddit for inspiration. Any other forums or workflows you can suggest for brainstorming ideas. I usually just walk around writing things down in my phone, but thinking about more active brainstorming
The happy hour app sounds useful, especially "at scale" if it could be expanded to almost any type of event... one app that would let people easily vote on event details like food, music, etc. Would be nice if it integrated with existing event platforms like Facebook Events. Might be difficult to monetize this idea, though. Maybe your app could also let event organizers order the food/drinks and you'd take a cut? Not sure.
Project expertise hub is a tough nut to crack. I've seen so many wikis and document systems at companies that eventually just get abandoned. Even for Indie Hackers, I have tons of Google docs, and they get disorganized easily. I think the problem is that it's way easier to create these types of documents than it is to maintain them, organize them, and keep them updated. If you could solve that problem, it would be amazing! It seems like one of those basic problems like chat where every company has a poor solution now, but eventually a Slack will come along and do it better.
Re: HTML editing tool, have you seen InvisionApp? A ton of designers use it to communicate their designs to clients and coworkers... I've seen at at least 3-4 startups in SF. Might be a good source of inspiration, since they're clearly getting something right!
Happy Hour App: This sounds cool. It would be a good idea to pull bars from Yelp and as per 'doing things that don't scale' I think curating certain cities would work out nicely; referencing menus, prices, specials and events. Leads can be found through WeWork and contacted by hand for beta testing, with a very low commission (stripe payment through the app). Users > quick money.
I've had my best ideas alone. I think that a pen and paper provides the best workflow. Once I switched from using my phone to a notebook it opened up the paradigm including drawings, which was kind of a game changer. Thoughts and drawings kind of react with eachother.
And if you're not against it and little weed has always been known to act as a spark for new ideas :)
Slow Nov so far. 🦃
I tried this before but never finished it: saas product subsctiption service.
Building an e-comm platform for saas subscriptions is a pain. Subscription plans & features, hook up the payment processing, users can up/downgrade, etc.
Would be awesome to have a service that handled this for you. You just enter your subscription info and pricing and the sevice handles the rest including generating your pricing tables.
Analytics throughout, api and web hooks.
Curious to know if anyone has needed something like this before?
It doesn't have everything you mention but you might find Laravel Spark interesting:
https://spark.laravel.com/
We just recently tested the Koudoku Ruby Gem which does a lot of this work for you (including pricing pages). There's a tiny bit of configuration wrangling, but for the most part the primary subscription needs are automatically handled.**
The developer also has a more robust service that handles even more of the pain of subscription payments (think email receipts, past due balances, etc) called ChurnBuster. We haven't looked into it very far, but might be worth checking out.
**Note we ended up rolling our own solution since the Gem felt too opinionated for us.
Something I thought about last week
Digital Concierge Service - My current building doesn't have a concierge so that means I can't receive packages when I'm not home, no additional monitoring / security and no one to deal with visitor parking etc.. The idea is you would have a cameras and a tablet that would be connected to a "concierge" somewhere remote. The concierge could manage multiple buildings. The target market would be buildings that don't have a concierge because of the cost and space required.
I have an idea about a twitter altnernative. It should go equal to what was twitter 1.0. 14 characters text only and people are able to tweet once per day. If they want to tweet more then they have to buy tweets. Thats how the platform can make money without ads. Plus it should be hard on trolls or hate comments. An actual cleaner twitter similar to medium.
I'm surprised there's not already a more popular Chrome plugin that lets users flag a twitter account as troll, which then causes all tweets from this account to be blocked. The current models like requiring a user to block specific users always requires some first encounter with the troll, but why not just block trolls all together without them knowing using crowdsourced data in a Chrome plugin? I'd consider installing it, even though I've not experienced trolling myself directly.