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Ask HN: How do I come up with an idea?
28 points by junglefever on Oct 2, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
I'm currently studying a mixed media university degree which focuses a lot on web design and development now that I am in my final year. We have to submit a major project which is pretty much what potential employers will judge us on.

I drew up a few ideas, one of which my tutor told me to go for (it was a google maps/flickr API mashup) as it would push my coding skills and set me up for a path to take me down a more developer or hybrid approach (which I've started on anyways with learning Rails and coming from a programming background before university).

Turned out that it was already done and exists as the explore section on Flickr pretty much.

I'm struggling to find an idea that will push my abilities, is reachable, interesting and doesn't exist exactly as I imagine it already.

Any tips on how you come up with an idea?



Try thinking about things in life that you want to do but can't. Usually there's no reason, it's just the way things have always been.

You can disrupt these things. Look at the global fallout of the film and music industries. We did that. Us geeks.

The really, really hard problems are: governments; banks (finance in general); telcos. I'd avoid those until you've made your first billion. But they are great targets. They will fall one day. And someone will be responsible.

Here's a few. I moved house recently. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to get rid of. I found that freecycle sucked -- at least in this part of the world. I wanted a freecycle replacement, but something much better.

For stuff I wanted to sell, there was no option but ebay. I have moral objections to ebay, lots of them, so I wanted something else. I didn't want an auction. Just a place to list and sell.

And on the list goes.

It's like the reverse of buying stocks, where you buy into the things that solve your problems.

Next time -- that'll be later today or tomorrow -- that you find yourself saying "ffs, it can't be that hard", go and fix it.

And don't worry if someone thinks that they are doing it already. Because you can do it better, if you just think about it.


You can disrupt these things. Look at the global fallout of the film and music industries. We did that. Us geeks.

I can't upvote you enough. That's the single most inspiring thing I've ever read on HN. It's easy to take for granted, but it's everywhere. Newspapers. Manufacturing. Communications. Hell, even ask an old engineer how they did things in their field before CAD. (Engineers used to make a living wage reducing logic expressions by hand.)

We wrought this creative destruction, tearing this world down and building it back up again so it runs better.


Why not Craigslist? I've had so many good experiences with Craigslist that it is my default solution to anything involving "stuff".


Try forcing yourself to write 10 answers to each of these questions (taken from a PG article):

* What do I find intolerable?

* What luxury can I turn into a commodity?

* What big companies solution could I make easier to use?

* What will kids in 10 years look back on and not believe about how difficult our lives were?

Also, here is an article I wrote on the subject a while back with some more ideas: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/146/10-ways-to-come-up-with...


If you're looking for an idea for a mashup, one thing that works really well is thinking of two ridiculous and totally unrelated services and imagining what a combination of the two would look like. Try it a few times and you'll be surprised at what you might come up with.

I did this while working with Tom Coates back at Yahoo! in 2006 and we came up with a combination of News and Horoscopes: Astronewsology! http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/100449854/


I've always found that my best ideas come with an open mind and by "doing" something. It doesn't really matter if there is existing competition - you just need to do it 50% better to be a success. Who knows, you might be part way into the project and realize that there is a truly killer idea for a new audience. Keep an open mind and do something.

Here's a good idea as an example:

http://www.lifesta.com/

The folks who created this site were likely impressed with Groupon and asked themselves, "what happens if I don't use this coupon that I'm going to impulse buy?" Open to ideas while using the service, they created a marketplace not just for Groupons, but that could be used across all of the groupon clones. With some good press and improved functionality / polish, a good idea will go to great.

Beyond erroneously telling you to "do" things with an open mind, here are 2 things that I do when I'm looking for new ideas:

1) I disconnect completely from technology, change my scenery and think without distraction. Getting into a pattern is the key for this to work. I usually book off Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when I'm in idea mode and no matter what else is going on, I disconnect, go for a hike and relax while brainstorming. Often, I'll toss a digital audio recorder in my pocket so that I can spit out ideas without writing - but nothing else.

2) When I'm trying to think of ideas, I talk to people. Go to local geek meetups / conferences and use the room as a sounding board. While it's not incredibly honest, I find that confidently telling people that I'm already the CEO of my new project idea, judging their reaction and listening to their feedback / questions is a lot more valuable then a conversation based around the sentence "what do you think about this idea".

I hope that these things help you out.


That was eerily close to how we came up with the idea for Lifesta. We went through a period of brainstorming after a previous idea didn't go anywhere. We focused on marketplaces as a base for brainstorming though we came up with things that were completely unrelated. Finally, and frankly as a joke, my partner suggested a secondary market for groupon-style vouchers since we both liked them and knew people that bought but haven't used them. When we analyzed the idea, we actually liked it a lot...


I agree to some extent with everyone here stating that an idea doesn't need to be novel to develop your skills. However, I do think executing on an idea of your own versus reverse engineering something that exists does require much more from you. With a project that is entirely your own, you have nothing to fall back on. When you start at square one, you must design and implement everything.

So with that being said, I'd encourage you to check out a book called Thinkertoys[1]. Although it's a little elementary at times, it lays out specific techniques to get your creative juices flowing. Its great for analytical types because it provides a concrete framework for a very abstract activity (idea generation).

--- [1] http://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-Thinking...


I get the sense that I'm old school compared to a lot of hacker news folks. As such, the way I've done it may not help but what the heck, can't hurt.

I listen to people, especially customers and potential customers, and pattern match. Been doing it for years. I try and get them to tell what problem they want solved but they rarely do that, they tell me what they want to buy. It's up to me to work backwards to what problem it is they want solved. Key point: listen to them, but not to what they want, find the problem they want solved.

Once you work out the problem, just shove it in a mental hash indexed by problem name and yielding a counter. Each time you see a problem, bump the counter.

When you are looking for a problem to solve, look through the hash at the ones that have high counters. Pick the one that you think you might be able to solve, looks interesting, looks like people will pay for it.

Believe it or not, that has worked for me for years, extremely well. It's perhaps hard to see that if you are in school or new in the industry. I remember what that felt like, it felt like I didn't know what to do. I remember thinking I couldn't come up with a good idea for a PhD thesis. I went to Sun and within a year or three had literally dozens of ideas, any one of which would have made (IMO) a fantastic thesis.

I'm not sure how to apply this to today's world. It worked for me because I went to work for a large company that had lots of potential customers. Marketing figured out that I liked to talk to customers and customers liked to talk to me (I was in the kernel group at Sun). I learned to keep a clean shirt hanging on the back of my door because I'd get random calls saying "Hey, lm, ATT is at PAL-1, can we swing by and get a brain dump on the clustering stuff?" which would lead to wide ranging discussions of what they wanted us to build. Access to those customers was huge, they were the source of the problems that needed to be fixed.

TL;DR summary - listen to customers, work backwards to the problem they need solved, build up a list of those, work on the one with the most hits.


The data visualization realm might be something for you. Take a look at Stamen Design for inspiration (http://stamen.com).

There is so much more interesting data than maps and Flickr photos out there, from government data to the data that New York City makes available, to Twitter streams or Facebooks social graph, etc. Take a look at this list of popular APIs on programmable web for some inspiration - http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?sort=mashups

If you make a cool visualization that makes an interesting topic easy to understand, you can be sure that it will get some nice coverage, too.

Hope that helps.


The most common advice is to think about pain points: what in your day to day life or the life of those around you is an annoyance and how could you code something to fix it? The main problem with this approach is that the fix might not be worth a significant amount of money to people. Assuming this is only for a school project that aspect shouldn't matter and you might find some great ideas. A couple resources that might help: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/08/05/how-to-get-good-ide... and http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html


I've got the opposite problem, tons of ideas and not the coding skills to make them happen. I also have a knack for taking half-baked ideas and turning them into something viable.

That aside, my ideas come from observing things I and others do frequently (or want to do) that can be improved. Read rags, ask your peers what they do online,

Some examples from my list, I hope they spawn some ideas for you

My current attempt is for online book/paper editing spawned by my writing of a Security Handbook I want online and in deadtree format. Simple really: importing of documents (Word, ODF, RTF), browsable/readable display by chapter/section, WYSIWY{G,M} editor with revision/track changes, layout templates, exporting of content to to PS, ePUB, PDF. For monetization being tied in with publishers.

buying a house? tired of collecting addresses, realtor names and those MLS numbers? Geolocation + "bookmarking" and tie in to MLS database

"What is that song?" Recording song sample, identify unique artifacts (fingerprinting) and compare to database of known songs. Crowd sourcing would help here.

HTML5 Darknet. Websocket P2P network for a website, connect visitors and (selectively) allow chatting, sharing of bookmarks, play list, calendars

One more based on your question: a place for sharing of ideas that connects experienced developers to people with challenging ideas. :)

AS you can see, these come from common issues that people run into. Best of luck!


Don't look for ideas. Look for problems.


Have a look for something that interests you. After you've looked at several sites, you should find somethings that you would like to do but can't or are difficult to do well. Having identified a problem you have the idea for an improvement.

Just look at all the add-ons that Facebook, Yahoo, etc have attracted. Each of them addresses a specific short-coming.


If you're interested in journalism, trends, government and information visualization / mashups and usability, shoot me an email.

I am still organizing the team while building the infrastructure, and I will add you to the mailing list to stay in the loop, maybe something for you after school :-)

For now here is an idea for you. After big political events, you usually have media coverage of opposing points of view using the same photo-set. After a Palestinian-Israeli peace summit, for example, you will see the same image with different headlines.

Scrape Google News for images pertaining to a keyword ("Obama" for example) and do a visualization showing one photo, along with every headline in a news article it has appeared in. You can use the TinEye API for that.

You will shock the world by laying rhetoric bare. In a future version you can add sentiment analysis to sort the articles in a two-column format, but that will require more programming (unless you opt for a crowd-sourced solution; two arrows "negative/positive", etc.)

If you like this, there is more where it came from :-)

Cheers!


Just because it's already done doesn't mean it can't push your abilities and isn't reachable.

Flickr would have had the resources to do anything they wanted with the project. You, as the only guy on it, will have to make tradeoffs and sacrifice features in order to get it done. What part of that isn't helpful in the real world?


Have a conversation with somebody who is interested in discussing ideas with you. It can be anybody, really, even if they aren't interested in pursuing something like you are. Just the act of having a dialog with a person (vs. the internal dialog you have when it's just yourself) has helped me time and again to get through a problem, come up with better ways to do something, work through the details of new ideas, etc. My thought process goes in directions it wouldn't go on its own. There have been many times when I'm just running something by my girlfriend, and before she even says something back, I'm thinking in different ways just because I said it out loud.


I think idea generation/ creativity is a competitve advantgage because it is a skill that a lot of people don't have and it is essentially the ability to create "possible" new value.

But as people mentioned they worthless if you do not execute.

I come up with good ideas all the time becasue I am naturally curious on how things work and love to solve problems. It is psychologically rewarding to me to solve complex problems and coming up with ideas and being correct. So if you are natually curious and can critically think you should be coming up with a lot of ideas.


It comes from spending time in some domain, like wikipedia, photo sharing, forums, shopping etc... You don't just come up with an idea out of the blue, you do something long enough and you'll have an idea in that domain and have a few hunches on how to execute it well.

There was a TED talk about how people come up with ideas, can't remember what it's called. Basically ideas take time to develop just like everything else, they only seem like eureka moments because they sometimes come about when you're not focused.


You might wanna watch this video titled 'Where good ideas come from'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU


Stop thinking about new ideas and start getting deeper in the first thing that comes to your mind. Iterate through it, don't develop yet. Be at least one/two weeks thinking only about it, Can it be extrapolated to something else?, How would you do it?, Improve it in your mind, iterate few times, find which niche could fit. Start implementing it... and iterate again, and again.

After a few weeks you will get a deep understanding on it... ideas will flow.


Killer ideas generally come from personal experience within a field and look obvious to the person in question. You cannot create fire by banging rocks together unless you know what you're doing. What I'm getting at is you can't create a new never seen idea without having some background in that field but you can apply what you know to create something better.


I would assume that you've already heard it some times, but I find this way of finding an idea to be very good:

Take a shower, and what your mind thinks about during the shower could lead you into some pretty interesting ideas. Of course, they have to be relevant to your study, but they may not immediately look like they are: That's usually how great ideas come to life.


That is a decent idea. Also, showering regularly to generate new ideas has some useful side effects. ;)


Start coding the flickr mashup and keep your mind open during the process. It'll morph - you'll see something you can do. Other advice in this thread is sound on the general idea creation process - I would also add talk to people! Talk to people with problems, talk to an underserved group, talk to your friends and family, etc.


I think ideas come with life experience, so get out and experience the world.

Really take notice of your surroundings and the people in them, and then most importantly notice how the people interact with the surroundings. Then ask yourself, is there a better way to do this?


Pick something you dislike about something you consume, and imagine how you would fix it.


By asking questions, and putting answers in different contexts.

For instance, questions about the reality such as "what if?", "what makes it right?". Once there's the answer, try to find another space where it fits.


If you're thinking along the lines of mash-ups, I'd Google search for a web 2.0 API list, and then pick a couple to put together that would be really slick.


Ideas come with experience, you push something to the edge and you realize the next stage doesn't exist and it's up to you to create it if you want it to.


A must read - http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html


Do it anyway, and find little things you can do differently or better.


look for things around you. see which things you wish there was an app for to make it easier.

Think more about how you would want software to do it.

and go for it.

Dont worry if you dont reach your goal. You will learn a lot.


Some random thoughts:

1. Good ideas are cheap. You sound like you're after a killer idea. There are very few killer ideas. Amazon was originally just buying booms online. Google? A search engine. eBay? An auction site.

2. What matters is execution not the idea.

3. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean it's already done. You can have a different (better) take or simply do it better.

4. Pain points are a good starting point. Look at your life. What hires? What could be better?

5. Software is a great starting point because a decade an onternet startup took $5 million whereas now it is as little as $20k.

6. Don't get caught up in hype. For example social media is now (IMHO) hugely overhyped. You need to be somewhat contrarian.

7. Realize when a field is "done". For example, location. You would need a veru different take at this point to compete in this very crowded market.

8. Timing is everything. There was a video on demand startup or two every month before Youtube struck gold.

9. Success will take longer than you think it will.


Your idea doesn't need to be novel in order to develop yourself further as a developer. Do the flickr mashup if you want the experience.

A "Startup Idea" involves not just a feature, but something that is compelling enough to be a business. You should be in a position where you have more ideas than you can possibly do (this is my position- I get a new business idea every day, at least and a good one every week.)

So, I may not be able to relate to not being able to come up with ideas, but I would suggest if you're having trouble to think about the things that you see online and in the world, where there are problems, or inefficiencies that you can improve on. Great ideas are ones where it is a no-brainer to your customers and where what you're supplying them can be supplied at a very low cost relative to the value they are willing to pay for. Do try to look for things that are worth paying for- this sets the bar high enough, and means that you have something that can grow by itself without outside investment. IF you do get outside investment, a profitable business, is going to get better terms than one that bears higher risk.

Possibly more experience with engineering will help because it will help you identify areas where software can make peoples lives better.....

But do read a lot. Read entrepreneur books and blogs and understand that it will take awhile before you find the right idea and that it will take a lot of thinking about the possibilities of various ideas to understand what makes a good business for you to do. (Every entrepreneur is different and so their businesses will be different...find one that plays to your unique makeup.)




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