Ask HN: What should I build?

[mattigames]

I have a few Ideas and I would like to know which one has the best chances of success:

a) A dating app like tinder (Android/ios) but you post just one 20 seconds video (no text, no pics)

b) A Chrome extension to seamlessly merge facebook and whatsapp on a single tab

c) A Chrome extension to edit videos online (right click "edit video" get simple edit options: cut/copy+paste/add-text/add-png)

d) Webapp to easily slice photoshop files (PSD) to generate responsive CSS (with JSX exporting)

e) A Webapp that autoplays all reddit front-page gifs+videos one after another, with option to log in to only do it with the channels you are subscribed; or click any channel to do it with those ones

I'm open to ideas that are not too far off those ones (yeah; I know r/AppIdeas exist)

[justboxing]

a.

It's the closest of all others to the instincts in our 'reptile brain' * , so done and marketed right, you should have no issues getting new user signups, monetization, etc.

It's also one of those things you can do solo, without investors and lot of 'partners' / employees. And I'm guessing you have a day job and are trying to do a project on nights, weekends.

> Markus Frind works one hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. How does he do it? He keeps things simple.

> Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year.

Source: https://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-ro...

* = Relationships, the need to 'connect', love, sex, food, shelter, money..... any app / startup in this space is what I consider pertaining to reptile brain, so very hard for humans to resist trying / downloading / using, esp. if it's "FREE".

[stephenr → justboxing]

Are you saying you’re a lizard person?

[stephenr → stephenr]

Wow. HN has no sense of humour apparently.

[sharemywin → stephenr]

From what I've found, I would probably agree with your statement. Sometimes by the end of the day it might get upvoted back to zero.

[wvenable → stephenr]

In general, joke comments are not tolerated on HN.

[sincerely → wvenable]

Joke comments: 50% chance of being downvoted

Complaining about downvotes: 100% chance of being downvoted

[fardo]

The better question is "Why do you want to build these things", because the answer to that question would help answer yours.

Are you looking to make money? Then Chrome extensions probably aren't a great way to do it, given that they're distributed for free, and a dating app might be questionable, but an online video editor might be a good idea.

Are you looking to make something you'd find useful for yourself? An in-browser video editor or gifplayer probably wouldn't be very useful for you, but the extensions could be very helpful for you.

Are you looking to build up a portfolio? Then it doesn't matter which you build, all of the above projects probably would be okay portfolio pieces.

I personally would not be interested in paying for any of the above, but as I'm trying to explain, that doesn't necessarily matter if you're not making it for money or you're not trying to cater to HN's demographic. Figure out what's guiding you and I'm sure you can filter at least half of the ideas off this list.

[danenania]

I think which one to work on depends on your definition of success and the path you want to take to get there. Do you want to raise money and build a huge company? Do you want to bootstrap a small profitable company? Or do you just want to have fun making something and getting as many people as you can to use it?

a is nice because you can do a quick MVP to validate it. If it catches on, you can run with it, but you won't waste too much time if it falls flat. Remember though that dating apps have the chicken and egg problem, so you need a plan for how to seed it with early users. It also has the issue that it's pretty easy to copy on a technical level, so you need to build a great community and/or come up with some kind of network effect that's hard to replicate. The challenges of this one will be more on the community-building side than the tech-side.

b seems like you'd be too dependent on an outside platform. Plus if it caught on, FB could just build it themselves. It sounds pretty easy to build though, so that's good. If it got popular and had a lot of users, maybe you could think of some interesting directions to take it.

c sounds interesting. If it's well-designed and well-marketed, I could see something like that going viral. How to make money is a bit of a tricky question though. Who would pay for this? Perhaps you could monetize with ads, but you'd need massive numbers.

d sounds useful, but it also sounds like a substantial project. I'd do some tech exploration to make sure it's reasonably doable and also some market validation ahead of time, as I presume it would entail a big project. If it works well, it sounds like something you could definitely charge for. Tech challenge aside, it's probably the most straightforward idea to turn into a profitable saas business.

e - sounds like a fun project. I could see it taking off on some subreddits, but it might be hard to sustain people's interest. From a business-perspective, you'd very dependent on an outside platform. But like with b, if you're able to get a ton of sign ups, you could potentially take it in some cool directions.

[bausshf]

a.

It's really the only thing of those that people are going to care about.

I kinda like that idea, it's like a snapchat/tinder merge.

Here's why I don't think the others will work:

b) This might be useful for a very few, but most people use Facebook or Whatsapp from their phones and thus a browser extension might be a waste.

c) How often do you really need to edit videos online? Or how often does the general public need to edit videos online? The answer is: Not so often, if ever.

I don't see it working in practice either. Like how are the video edits going to be available to anyone, but yourself? And if not, then what's the point?

d) Is this really a common practice still? I mean, most people still use Photoshop to design the basic layout, but I don't think anyone really uses sliced PSD's as a mean of template anymore, at least not professionally.

e) Just seems like it's going to be a noise creator.

[taytus]

You won't find success based on your ideas. You will find it once you create something people are willing to use and/or pay for it. I would first do a very basic market validation. Ask a couple of people (not us) how do they feel about these ideas. Try to decipher if this is really a pain point and build from there.

[tokyodude]

You should build a cheap weather sensor (arduino/pi?) and then an app the compares various weather companies and checks how accurate their predictions were throughout the world. (frustrated at how often Google/Apple mislead me)

[is_true → tokyodude]

You need a few. I did this with only one and it's a bit unfair because during summer where I live storms tend to be smaller and sometimes it rains in one place and not 100m further.

[hhh]

C, with another suggestion.

A super simple button on Reddit that I can click to download an immediate version of whatever it is on v.reddit. I currently just yt-dl it but would be faster in-browser.

[zakum1]

Which one do you feel the most passionate about? can you create a network of people that will help you design, test and build the proposition?

[bsvalley]

The answer to your question is a question - how many people want each of these product ideas? Pick the idea that scored the highest number.

[shatu29]

Do you need a hand with number a? or else I might just steal your idea :p

[wolco]

d. Please. One of the more usable ideas that could grow quickly.

[stephenr → wolco]

I agree that D sounds like the easiest to market if it’s reliable/effective. It also probably has more of an iceberg effect than the others - more unknowns that you can’t see initially.

PSDs are a hairy format - even people exporting things isn’t always straightforward, and a machine can’t reason the way a person does.

This idea was a pie-in-the-sky goal for a project I worked on ~ 10 years ago, and it was abandoned as too complex to do it reliably, within a reasonable timeframe.

Given that psd’s are just layers of raster graphics (but plausibly just a single layer) I doubt even adobe could make the tool as described, and they have the benefit of ~25 years of knowledge about photoshop and PSDs.

[godot → wolco]

A similar tool/startup already exists, but for Sketch instead of PSD: https://pagedraw.io/

I believe this was posted on HN a while back.

[collyw → wolco]

Out of interest do you know of any decent tutorials on how to do this manually?

[wolco → collyw]

I don't but would love to see a good tutorial.

The way I approach this is to use the slice tool. 10 years ago I would have cut boxes ajd change the background to the imagine and set width or height to 100%. The important part was picking a repeatable image when scaled 100%

[toufique]

C

[tim333 → toufique]

yeah C sound cool though it could be tricky to implement well