Ask HN: I know how to build, but not what to build. I can haz help?

[zafriedman]

Title is pretty self explanatory, but the catch is that the following are NOT acceptable answers:

Anything related to the Lean Startup Anything related to Customer Development Anything related to any other form of fanboy, wantrepreneur bullshit

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that these above references are bad (except maybe the last one), nor am I implying that the third is descriptive of the first two, I just think they are overused. Trying to tease out some new ideas here.

[Arun2009]

Freelance on sites like elance. Seriously.

As a developer, you never know what kind of applications people need or are looking to create, but you get ideas from the projects that are posted. Most projects I'm interested in are clones with a "twist". For example, there was a request to clone zocdoc, but with a twist. There was project for rental items management software that I worked on. Another that combined invoicing and job scheduling for people such as plumbers and landscapers. Currently I'm working on a clone of elance but for a different industry. I would have known NONE of this if I weren't freelancing.

[mindcrime]

Are you trying to build a business, or do you just want a hobby project? If you want a hobby, I can give you all sorts of ideas. If you want to build a business, I have serious questions about your mindset if you think "lean startup" principles or customer development are "fanboy, wantrepreneur bullshit."

That said, there have been several similar questions in the past week or two, with some good answers. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4119534

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106655

among others.

[zafriedman → mindcrime]

Thanks for the response. A few things:

The disclaimer was meant to say that I'm not labeling those as such, just that they seem overused to me. I'm also not looking for a startup idea.

Can I ask what specifically you have used successfully and with what results have come of applying the Lean Startup methodology? It also scares me regarding the community of entrepreneurs out there when someone questions the mindset of someone taking a contrarian view to the Lean Startup. Putting shit out in the consumer space especially can be an instant death, and that's fact not opinion. If I was working for a B2B startup I would be much more likely to agree with you.

[mindcrime → zafriedman]

Can I ask what specifically you have used successfully and with what results have come of applying the Lean Startup methodology?

It's early to say, as we're still in the first phase of Customer Development at the moment. But we've been following the methodology fairly closely to "by the book" and feel pretty good about what we've learned as we've gone. As we're starting to ask customers to prioritize the problems we're discussing in the Problem Presentation phase, we're expecting that will help us start to prioritize feature development. Also, some of the stuff from the problem hypothesis brief will probably transfer fairly directly into marketing collateral.

It also scares me regarding the community of entrepreneurs out there when someone questions the mindset of someone taking a contrarian view to the Lean Startup.

Sure, that makes sense. I'm a contrarian by nature myself, and I always advocate questioning orthodoxy. That said, I'm a big fan of the Customer Development methodology so far.

Putting shit out in the consumer space especially can be an instant death, and that's fact not opinion. If I was working for a B2B startup I would be much more likely to agree with you.

Yeah, we're doing B2B, so my take may be a bit different than somebody who's doing a consumer app.