Ideas Thread (October 2016)
Last month Rtony started what I hope will become a monthly tradition around here: an ideas thread! (You can see last month's post here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KS11_6WiP7kOg_PAuk_)
If you've got a business idea to share, post it below!
It can be an idea you have no intention of working on, or it can be something you're already tackling but would just like some feedback on. Feel free to post a list of ideas, too, if you have lots to share! Also, you're welcome to post any insights you have with how to come up with ideas or evaluate them.
This is a "meta-idea":
On the other side, there are plenty of people w/ sizable audiences (bloggers, forum owners) that don't have the resources to build a software product. They're good at writing, crafting content but doing anything w/ software is incredibly intimidating (huge budgets, offshore fiascos etc.)
Thus, the meta idea is to reach out to people you personally follow (like all the blogs on your RSS reader) and pitch them on the idea of collaborating on a software product for their audience.
Has anyone ever done this? Or heard of any companies that started this way?
https://www.pitchcard.io/ is sort of this to some degree, though I'm not sure it has the critical mass to really be informative yet.
Checked out pitchcard, looks like the difference is that anybody w/ an idea can "pitch" on there. IMO ideas from most people are worthless. The "Idea Guy" is a negative stereotype for a reason.
Instead, I'd want to partner w/ someone who has an existing audience (and proof of that, i.e. X,000 or XX,000 mailing list subscribers, +100K Google Analytics traffic, etc.). That's real value that they are bringing to the table. The work to build an audience is equal in value to the work of building a piece of software in my opinion.
If that person had an idea targeting their existing audience, then I'd listen and be eager to partner w/ them. But not some random Joe off the internet.
What I wonder is if cold-contacting people you personally follow to partner w/ them is a viable strategy. That's what I plan to do after my current consulting engagement wraps up.
Just talked with a friend about the exact same thing. We need to find people with a built in audience.
One of my most successful products was built like this, I partnered up with a forum owner... after few years he also bought the product from me, win-win.
Have you tried this approach with cold-contacting?
"The work to build an audience is equal in value to the work of building a piece of software in my opinion."
No doubt!
Directory website to discover Youtube channels/Twitch streams:
Similar to IMDb with some additional discovery features such as curated list, filters, personal list, smart suggestion engine, etc.
I was thinking of this the other day. This and a site that lets you search through and manage your saved videos, playlists, and watch history.
Pretty cool idea. I did something similar (mostly to improve my frontend skills and as a technical challenge) for movies. I don't make any money from it though! - https://movietag.io
It looks really good! If you are interested maybe we can work on it together... Shoot me an email: hi at saeedreza dot me
Made to order spice blends
Many of my friends, including myself, are first generation children whose families immigrated to the US from varied parts of the world. Almost every household I've visited has always had a little jar of custom made spice blends that they use in everyday cooking or for specific dishes, such as Pakistani keema or Vietnamese Pho. For me, it's quite difficult putting together these blends because 1) it takes too long and 2) I may not need that many individual spices if I were to maintain correct proportions.
The service would allow users to simply create spice blends in whichever fashion they prefer--crushed, whole, etc.
There are many spice companies that offer custom blending, but every company I've seen has required contact with a rep rather than being self-service.
Sounds like an intriguing idea, let us know how it goes!
Awesome thread here! I am a grad student at Cornell where I am getting my ass kicked in machine learning, but doing well and learning some awesome algorithms (association rule learning for market basket analysis, principal component analysis to build recommendation systems,Naive Bayes to determine cuisine from ingredients, logistic regression for news feed ranking, PCA, etc.). I was wondering if small businesses would want to use these powerful methods to improve their business? Large companies have in-house talent to use machine learning, but would small to mid-sized businesses would want freelancing/consultant to leverage ML?
If anyone is interested in leveraging machine learning for an idea they have, feel free to reach out to me! Looking forward to all of your responses :).
Hi hubbub, thanks for posting!
Large companies have billions in the bank and huge R&D budgets that allow them to experiment with new tech risk-free. They also have humongous data sets and huge numbers of customers, so even modest improvements to their processes can make them millions of dollars. Smaller companies, on the other hand, stand to lose much more and gain much less.
My advice to you is to always focus on benefits, not implementations! What small business owners want is to increase their revenue, decrease their spending, save time, etc. (It gets more specific than this of course, but these are the fundamental goals.) If you can sell them on benefits like these, then you are set, and they won't care how you do it... neural networks, rule-based systems, whatever, it won't matter to them.
If you do things the other way around (aka the solution-looking-for-a-problem approach) then it's highly likely you'll spend months/years building cool stuff that nobody will ever pay for. I know, because I've been there. 😉
Try picking a problem! Pick something valuable that any business might want, like "increase your Twitter followers". Then find out what the best solution you can build is, which may or may not involve ML.
Here's my idea that I'm looking for some validation/feedback:
A website dedicated to tifos, the large fan displays at MLS soccer games. Would be built on wordpress using the Chipmunk theme.
I've created some mockups, take a look: http://imgur.com/gallery/JaAth
Appreciate any feedback!
The design looks great! Big challenges: (1) how do you generate traffic for that, and (2) how do you make money? Is your goal to make money with this?
I think the hiring process could always use some more automation. For some background, I'm looking for another job right now and actively interviewing with 15-20 companies. It's kinda hard to keep track of stuff.
A few problems:
Maybe something like a "CRM for job seekers", or for the other side "CRM for HR people"? Of course that's only in my limited experience – I've never done freelancing/contracting and I've never built a side product.
Also holy crap, TJ hangs out here! I'm a huge fan.
An API for affiliate links. Given some amount of text as input (anything from a few words to an entire blog post), it would find terms that correspond to products on Amazon (or any other affiliate program) and generate the appropriate affiliate links. This would make life way easier for any content creator hoping to monetize.
Better Twitter tools. Yes, Buffer makes it easy to schedule tweets, but lots of other things are hard: managing multiple accounts simultaneously, previewing tweets (including attached content) before they go out, finding a steady stream of content to tweet about or to retweet, etc. I'm sure many other businesses have these problems, too. Tweetdeck kind of helps, but it's buggy and feels like nobody is maintaining it.
Crowdsourced Twitter communities. Twitter allows you to make lists, but only one person at a time owns a list. We need crowdsourced lists that everyone can help maintain. Then I can just search for "bootstrappers", for example, and find an up-to-date list of people to follow in that community instead of having to hunt them down one by one.
Cheap dashboard software for developers. Options like Geckoboard and Leftronic seem overly expensive. There's probably room for a cheaper entrant? Especially if it targets developers, who are capable of and willing to do a lot of the setup legwork themselves.
If I've learned anything it's that developers don't pay for things haha, at least most don't. Developers definitely have the "oh I could do that myself" mindset, even if their time is worth $100+/h they can't really seem to connect the two.
Even something as cheap as $9/m has been "too expensive" for some, even though that's like 10 minutes worth of time for most engineers. Selling to companies is definitely where it's at.
On a side note Metabase is pretty decent (open source) for SQL dashboards!
I've seen this quite a bit, but I've also been thru a lot of startups where I was thinking "they actually pay that amiunt for that?"
I think it just depends on the service and you'll prob get a little further by not marketing to devs specifically.
Haha yeah I used to think that as well, but I guess anything around the $100/m range is peanuts for most businesses, especially when a single engineer is like 10-20k/m, but developers themselves don't think about that.
I was surprised that stuff like Baremetrics https://baremetrics.com/open only has ~650 customers, for the price I can't imagine why you wouldn't use it, unless you want to re-invent all that stuff of course haha.
Yeah, definitely the case. I'm personally guilty of it all the time. And I see other developers bewildered at how much money lots of the companies in the Indie Hackers interviews are making, because they don't think anything is worth paying for haha
I've been surprised by some too, I think there was the one which just transfers playlists, I would have never thought that would generate income haha, really interesting to see.
I'm trying to delegate more dev-wise as long as I don't think the startup is going to disappear :D... that's the main reason I build ad-hoc stuff.
This isn't exactly scientific, but here are some fun stats from the interviews I've done that back up what you said above about selling to companies rather than individuals:
Note: This adds up to more than the total number of companies, because some sell to businesses and consumers.
Interesting! Wish I knew more about how to approach businesses, the Canadian spam law is pretty intense so cold emailing isn't really possible haha.. time to move?
Yeah, direct sales and cold emails are pretty effective from what I hear. In lieu of that, other approaches that seem to have helped people I've interviewed:
Ahh yea good points, I try to keep the partner one in mind a lot more now, cross-promotion with existing products is definitely a huge help.
I'm a little scared of the ones that cater to a huge audience, say like a snapchat, because you'd have a huge overhead and potentially no monetization for a long time, or if your conversions are off you just bankrupted yourself haha.
Tricky to think of ideas once you factor in all the limitations of bootstrapping, fun though! I still need more problems haha, trying really hard to be more observant and get away from powering through issues.
@csallen it would be cool if there was a way to make your interviews more "realtime". Given that MRR can grow/fall quickly, especially with very new businesses, it would be awesome to pick some companies to keep track of and see their monthly progress?
Maybe an auto-email sent to the businesses asking for their new MRR and auto-update based on the email response?
Yeah, that's been an issue at the back of my mind since launch. I've got a few more important things in the pipeline before I figure out a solution, but keeping the interviews up-to-date is something I want to figure out.
All these are great ideas.
For the affiliate api with an amazon account, for instance, were you thinking something like:
Something like that?
Yeah that's it, except you'd be able to send your content (just the text) directly to the API. That way you can add the affiliate links before you post the content publicly.
@csallen Can you send me an example of content I can test against and expectations on how many links youd expect?
https://www.funtraker.com Trying to develop Uber for entertainment, integrating social features with entertainment data. Movies, tv shows, games, and animes. Four major aspects of entertaintment on same platform for the first time.
First step was to gather the data, DONE, next basic pages for showing the detail of movies, tv shows, games, animes < mostly done.
Next is notification and recommendations. Idea is to track users entertainment and cross recommendation. Like if user A like actions & adventure movies app will recommend him action & adventure games related to his fav movies. Note this is the two-way recommendation. Working on it!! And the list goes on guys!
Need to polish the idea though, need to decide the core value proposition of this app. Help ? suggestion ?
Regarding the dashboard, https://freeboard.io/ might be something?