
Ask HN: How do you come up with new project ideas? - Skywing
I mostly target web-related projects. But, with any project, how do you all come up with ideas for them?<p>Back when I mostly did desktop applications, I would write applications for simple things that I enjoyed - countless IRC clients, IM clients, etc. With my web projects I find it harder to do that because I always apply to "could this potentially become popular" or "this has been done before" mentalities to them. So, as a result I just find myself scouring the internet every day, reading as many blogs and staying as up to date on bleeding edge things as I can. I keep my eyes peeled for potential statements made in blogs or on websites that might make me think something could be a great idea. I feel like I do this because when I end up making things that solely benefit me, I just end up making countless pastebins or blogs or IRC channel loggers.<p>So, how do you all decide what your next project will be? Do you do what I do and read the <i>entire</i> internet looking for a sign? Do you just make things you truly enjoy and hope maybe one day if it gets exposure it can gain traction and grow?
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callmeed
1\. Pick a broad industry (say law/attorneys)

2\. Go to craigslist for your nearest city

3\. Post a job for the category that best fits the industry you chose in #1
above. The post should be along the lines of: "Local software startup is
seeking experienced attorneys and legal professionals to consult with. We need
help testing our software and validating our new product ideas. We can offer
free use of products after launch."

4\. You will absolutely get emails back from professionals and business owners
who simply want to help and think it's "cool" to be part of such a process.

Have coffee/lunch with them, pick their brain, find their pain points and make
a project out of it.

I've got 2 in the works that started this way.

~~~
faz
From a freelancer's perspective, I would be the only one working on a project
for a industry I choose [as you had suggested].

Wouldn't this require some form of prior experience in that industry?

Just wanted to know whether we do need prior experience in a specific
industry.

~~~
callmeed
I don't think so—that's why you're out looking for someone with domain
knowledge. For me, I really want to work in the food/restaurant space but I've
never owned/managed one. So I found people who do.

------
geuis
A good place to start isn't by solving someone else's problem, its solving
your own.

For example, I've noticed over the years that if a crowd of people is going in
or out of an entrance that has a set of doors, for some reason most people all
crowd towards one door. To me, this is insane and a clear example of herd
mentality. I solve my own problem by being cognizant of this fact and always
look for other unused doors to go through.

In another example, early this year I was working on optimizing the css for
one of the sites at my company. I wanted a tool that would scan my site and
give me a report of unused css selectors that were not being used anywhere.

I look around for a while and the only tool I found that came close to what I
wanted was a Firefox extension called Dust-me Selectors. Except that I found
it didn't work well for shit. Also, it only ran in Firefox. Not very useful to
me.

So I spent a couple of days and wrote a pure javascript-based tool called
Helium to do this. <https://github.com/geuis/helium-css>

I can load this in my dev deployment of my site, pass it a list of urls I want
to test, and let it run. Additionally, I can run this in multiple browsers. I
solved my own problem, and in the process created something that other people
can use to solve the same problem.

~~~
iuguy
> A good place to start isn't by solving someone else's problem, its solving
> your own.

This is exactly what I've done for my HN November Launch App
(<http://www.minklinks.com/>). I repeatedly send links to my wife from various
computers and became cognizant of how awkward it was. We're both avid
Instapaper users so a bookmarklet seemed like an obvious way to share links
without leaving a page. The beta should kick in next week, but I'm still
accepting signups.

------
chipsy
A vague mental checklist I've been accumulating:

* Why didn't I stick with my last idea?

* Could I make that idea simpler?

* Could I reuse that idea elsewhere?

* Why am I not motivated to work on this idea (any more)?

* Could I change it around so that I am?

* What are people looking for?

* What are people NOT looking for?

* What ideas are already floating out there, that haven't been popularized, but could be done better?

* What ideas are getting too much hype and attention, so that I can filter them out?

And more recently:

* Is my idea trivial enough not to scare me?

Because it often happens that I'll end up with ideas that take serious
ambition(learning, funding, research, what-have-you) to reach any kind of
"viable product" - minimal or not. They involve too many sexy technical
challenges, or difficult dealmaking, or time-consuming/expensive content
creation. That in itself is a warning sign that I need to take what I'm doing,
slice up the ideas again, and reassemble them at smaller scope, because if I
try to get too ambitious too quickly, the risks go way up.

The worst part is that the more skilled you are at any one thing, the more
comfortable you are with overscoping that thing and going well beyond what is
necessary to ship, to the detriment of everything else. It's a good reason to
get some form of collaboration going, since it will average out your
perceptions and automatically bring them "closer to the market."

(And, ironically, collaborations online have an incestuous undercurrent:
talent will hide within their preferred watering hole and wish and whinge
about what they could do, when they need to venture elsewhere to find the
diversity of skills and ideas to achieve something bigger.)

------
mgkimsal
"I keep my eyes peeled for potential statements made in blogs or on websites
that might make me think something could be a great idea."

You asked for 'new' ideas, and now you're looking for 'great' ideas.

Stop.

I'd suggest going after neither. This presumes you're looking to potentially
make money at something.

Find an idea that a few other people are already executing, and copy that
idea, and make improvements. It may be a boring project/topic/idea, but if
others are doing it, it's _probably_ worth doing, or at least investigating
further.

If you're _not_ looking to make money, and simply looking to play with new
tech - not sure what to tell you. Just go play with new tech... ?

------
lunaru
Project or business? These are very different. I'm not sure why you'd be
having a hard time picking up a project, but having a hard time committing to
a business idea is more understandable.

HN is very male-dominant so I'll throw out something different: stop thinking
about yourself. Stop thinking about your demographic even. In fact, start
thinking about the about the opposite sex.

The average social gamer is 43 years and female. Zynga is making plenty of
money from these people, not 20-something techie males.

Another example: Etsy is making a killing by targeting arts & crafts.

Personally I think it's more interesting to pick a project from outside your
comfort zone. Think of it as learning in two dimensions: While you're building
it, you're honing your development skills, but you're also learning about a
set of users or customers that live very different lives from your own.

------
te_platt
1\. Every time I notice something annoys me I daydream about what I can do to
make it better - I think up a new one handed keyboard every time I reach for
my mouse.

2\. Joke with friends about outlandish ideas - solar powered bicycles, 128
team college football playoff system, whatever... You never know what might
turn up.

3\. Let people know what you do. I have people come to me all the time with
ideas they want to try out. If different people come with the same idea or
problem that's a good sign there is something to do.

~~~
kilian
This is exactly what I do. Figure out what annoys you, personally. Then think
about how to make it not annoying. Then build it.

If you want to make money, go ask your parents what they really dislike about
using computers. Then, follow the same process as above.

------
Udo
Do something that sounds like fun to you. Seriously, if keep wondering about
novelty, you already lost before you started. Almost every idea has already
been done in some way. And if it hasn't been done, chances are your innovative
project will live in obscurity while others come to the game later with the
same functionality will and suddenly really take off. Given those mechanics,
it also makes no sense to plan for popularity. Life (and the web) is unfair
that way.

But having said all that, the upside is, once you freed yourself from these
pressures and expectations, you can devote your energy to projects that really
motivate you with their intrinsic qualities. Doing them can be a great reward
in of itself, and it can push you to make something stunning, bold, and truly
beautiful. And sometimes, though very rarely, from these qualities there comes
popularity and the trappings of success that we all secretly hope for.

------
guynamedloren
Right now, I have a list of 12-15 ideas that I eventually want to implement,
and these are just the ones that I think have serious potential. To generate
ideas I have never once looked through blogs or tech articles about what's hot
or where the money is. Why? Because if I work on something that I'm not
passionate about, I will quit. It's inevitable.

To be honest, I don't actively seek projects to work on at all. Every single
one of my ideas has come from a problem, large or small, that has affected me
personally. The idea in the front of my mind right now is so vivid that it has
kept me awake at least 2-3 nights a week for the past 8 months. And it's not
even complicated or revolutionary, per se. I'll even share - it's a note-
taking app, like Evernote. I am learning how to code for the sole purpose of
realizing this project. If that's not passion, then I don't know what is.
Sure, plenty of my ideas have already been implemented in some shape or form,
but there's always room for improvement. That's how the world works. Google
didn't invent search. They made it better. Apple certainly wasn't the first to
build a smartphone. They just made it better.

“Our entrepreneurial motivation is not confidence, it's an insatiable desire
to improve. It's not about thinking your ideas are better than everyone
else's, it's about never accepting any idea as being best.”
<http://blog.asmartbear.com/self-doubt-fraud.html>

------
SapphireSun
I've not launched anything yet, but these have been my efforts so far:

1st project) My friend and I thought there was a market for a website, but it
turned out to be complicated and in a competitive space. Eventually we
abandoned it.

2nd project) I had a cool idea for something highly technical that I sort of
wanted. In truth, it was more complicated than I could handle and overly
ambitious. Abandoned. (It also turned out that it had been attempted in the
70s and 80s, and turned out to not be that great :P)

3rd project) Got pissed off at a big real world problem. Found a vastly
smaller chunk of the problem. This way I can help in a small way and actually
finish it.

The pattern I've been noticed is that I'm trying to get more ambitious in
solving a real problem while vastly scaling down the effort required in my
solutions and targeting less competitive markets. I'm amazed at how similar
business is to research in that regard. Tackle a reasonably sized problem that
has the potential to grow. Declare victory, rinse, repeat. As you gain
experience, your perception of tiny will enlarge. :-)

Another thing I've noticed within myself, I've started to amaze myself in not
seeing any contradiction between helping and asking for money. It's a
difference between understanding something rationally and viscerally.

I hope that you find this helpful in some way!

------
leif
after a half-eighth of mushrooms, Gerald tells me what to do next with my life
(he is my spirit frog)

------
gabea
To come up with ideas I take all of my experiences in my life and think about
things that normally would affect me on a daily basis.

Once I think of the idea I then apply the following set of rules.

1\. Does this exist and if so can it be done better? 2\. Would I use this? 3\.
Will this be valuable to another person or persons? 4\. Can a business model
be applied?

If I answer yes to all then I feel I have something viable to bounce off a few
family members and friends. After hearing their feedback I think about the
idea for some time so as to let it stew. If I keep coming back to it and start
to like it I make the decision to go forward or not. Even when I move forward
it is always a battle to stay on track so be strong.

------
aristus
Try training yourself to notice any time you or people around you get
frustrated or confused, and write it down. Also write down whenever some
process or artifact wastes time. Do that for a month and you'll have lots of
ideas.

------
mr_twj
Mandelbrot (roughly): _do not look at what you see, but at the process that
created it_.

Great ideas have infinite applications and all ideas are interconnected. The
trouble is knowing how far downstream you are from the source and if it is
untapped. In this sense, I couldn't say I _come up_ with any ideas, but
recognize the underlining pattern reoccurring. Let your reason guide you;
great minds find each other this way quite spectacularly.

edit: there are also those times where you just say, "I wish I could just do
____", and often you can.

------
melissamiranda
1\. Note problems people have, like the Techcrunch post yesterday with Sarah
Lacy complaining about OpenTable: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/can-and-
should-opentable-be...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/can-and-should-
opentable-be-disrupted/)

2\. Write a blog post about it

3\. See how many people react to my post when it's pushed to Facebook

4\. Keep developing the ideas that get a lot of attention (for me that's been
reviews/Yelp, and annoyance with paper business cards. The latter is turning
into a Japan focused startup)

------
yoak
My problem is typically how to pick between all the insanely good ideas I have
floating around.

I would say my number one rule is to pick something that is a deeply personal
itch that I can scratch. It is hard to have as much motivation to tackle
something because I think there might be a market for it as something that I
really just want to have exist so I can use it.

~~~
yoak
Re-reading that, I realize it could be read as my thinking that I believe all
my ideas are "insanely good." What I meant is that I have many ideas that are
compelling to me and seem insanely good... more than I could possibly execute
on.

------
jexe
1\. If you're a great developer, just pick an idea that you love so much that
you'll weather the inevitable storms that come. It can seem mundane or
'solved', you'll make it interesting. The 'killer idea' is usually a label
applied afterwards to a kick-ass execution of a normal idea.

2\. Screw business books and tech blogs, read science fiction. :)

------
gregschlom
>So, how do you all decide what your next project will be?

I got the idea for my startup from this list:
<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> (seriously)

Also, PG's take on this topic: <http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

------
bradleyjoyce
for me project ideas come from either problems I've experienced myself that I
want to solve, or some app that I know I want.

In the case of <http://tweetsaver.com>, there was no other solution at the
time it launched (over a year ago) that offered a decent way to back up my
tweets, as well as search all my old tweets. I knew that, had there been
another service at the time that offered this, I would have paid to use it.

Most of the ideas that I have that have come from speculating on what might be
theoretically useful or super successful/popular are still just domain names
:-)

------
kingsidharth
I don't run around looking for ideas.

 _I try to solve real problems._

~~~
Skywing
Well, this may be insanely obvious, but how do you locate real problems?

I realize there's an easy opportunity to make fun of me for asking that, but
I'm just curious. Do you solve problems that you yourself face? Do you look
around for signs of problems online? Ask people you know? All of this, I'm
guessing, would be worth while.

~~~
mgkimsal
"Try to solve real problems" is, imo, almost a cop out. It's too vague to be a
useful answer to to the question. As for people 'solving real problems'...
well... I've known _plenty_ of people who think they're doing just that. It's
_often_ identified as a problem they have themselves, or close friends. They
spend time working on it (often too long) without knowing there's already 50
solutions out there.

Which leads to 'research your audience before building'. Well... _how_ do you
do that? You need to make sure the people you're asking A) actually have a
clue and B) actually give a damn about having a clue.

My other answer, which may be more helpful (but probably not) is

1\. I find things that have been problematic for me from a tech standpoint, or
2\. I look for interesting tech I'd like to learn more about, and look at
industries friends/relatives are in.

With #1, for example, I learned SOLR a few years ago. It's not _that_ hard to
set up, but not everyone _can_ due to hosting restrictions. I'd played with
the idea of dedicated SOLR hosting, but dilly dallied too long - there's
multiple players there now. That's in some ways good - it was not a crazy
idea, if they're doing it too.

With #2, for example, I'd like to learn more about Twilio. I'm looking for
options to test out Twilio in the context of some current customers by
learning more about their business operations. It seems there's a couple
places where some custom Twilio integration makes sense, and we'll look to do
something early next year. Based on what's done for them, and how that works,
there might be a spin-off 'web business' from that.

I hope that helps a bit.

------
Skywing
Many great tips, all. I appreciate all of the insight! I think this has turned
in to a very informative thread.

------
mcantor
If you find yourself thinking something more than once, write it down.

