Inspo: Idea to MVP #1

Hi y'all!

This week I wanted to scratch an itch that has been pestering me like an unwelcome gnat for years...

An Intro to Inspo

Inspo helps designers easily create moodboards, optimising for inspiration and creativity.

Having worked in design a while, this is something I've known I've always wanted to build.

Usually, when creating moodboards, I start with a new Figma/Sketch page that feels like a breath of fresh air - but then quickly evolves into an annoying blob of screenshots, splayed awkwardly over each other in a pseudo-layout.

Regularly, I spend time refactoring the moodboard's layout to make it more neat and easy to look at. Then a new, randomly dimensioned image has to come in and I'm dragging things around again - left, right and centre.

Overall, I find moodboarding in design software a surprisingly tedious process and something that gets in the way of what should be a freeflowing and inspirational time as a designer. I shouldn't be thinking about layout at all.

I want to create something that takes care of laying out your moodboards, so all you have to think about is finding nice inspiration and dragging it in.

Secondly, I would love to be able to browse through all of my previous moodboards when I start a new project and see what that inspires creatively. You never know what combination of stimuli will spark your breakthrough.

Inspo is me, attempting to bring this to reality: https://www.useinspo.com

Day One

The first day of any project I work on begins with a walk to my favourite, local cafe with a notepad and pen.

I find that getting out of the silence of my office, and into the mild but vibrant buzz of a local cafe is amazing for my creative process. The hum of others journeying through their day helps me voyage further through mine.

Also, the 15-20 minute walk there, accompanied by one of my favourite podcasts, gets me in the mood.

And I mean... coffee.

I freeform on a notepad extremely often, as it helps me think. I usually just jot down bullet points as my brain ticks over on a topic. Today, I was thinking about what core functionality Inspo should bring to the table and why.

I then started to dive into database models, which I find a great starting point to understanding what a piece of software is actually doing.

The overall goal of this sort of session isn't to come up with anything concrete, but to help me take an idea from fuzzy shadow to more distinct silhouette.

I don't have a structure for how I do this, I just start writing down one thought as it leads to another - so they aren't lost.

Before long, I'd made my way through a page of notes and had a much clearer sense of my path to MVP for Inspo!

The key features I decided my MVP would need are:

• Auto layouts for moodboards, so the user can just drop in an image and never think about where it has to go

• The ability to shuffle a moodboard, potentially firing different creative sparks

• The ability to create an account to save + share moodboards

Eventually, I would also like to have:

• Automatic color palette detection and generation

• Ability to insert a link and Inspo will screenshot + add to moodboard

• (one day) recommendation engine for more images

When I got home, I dived into Figma to knock together a super basic landing page for the idea, so I could start talking about it here and on Twitter.

I came up with a logo that combines three of the core brand features:

• the letter I (for Inspo)
• lightning (representing how quick it will feel)
• sparkles (representing how magic it will feel)

I also landed on a bold blue and yellow palette - I want this brand to stand out. But of course, some proper moodboarding will have to come at some point as I properly flesh out the design system. Alas.

I booted up a repo on Github for the prelaunch landing page:

Using this simple Tailwind based Eleventy template, I was able to spin up the basic landing page on Netlify in about 30 minutes: https://webstarter.chriscollins.me/

Picked myself up my 100000th domain:

And voila, you can now register your interest at: https://www.useinspo.com

I can't wait to keep the Indiehackers community up to date with how I continue to flesh out this project. Let me know your thoughts on this post and whether it was interesting or not! Or if you have any thoughts about Inspo, of course every bit of feedback means a lot.

Feel free to drop me a follow on the Tweets: https://www.twitter.com/userlastname

Cheers,
Dan