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Idea: Educational app for Gen Z's & Millenials
From @joshuang35
Gen Zs and millennials are always offered services tailored to either process (etc. tuition or game coaching) or outcome (assignment service or boosting)
Would it be feasible to create an app just purely for middle ground for Gen Z and Millennials which focuses on assistance and improvement, which can provide options for those that do not want options at both end. For example, for education, the helper will help with crafting the structure of your assignment and help you but not do the assignment for you. Whereas for gaming, the higher skilled player will coach and help you during the game itself.
Do you want to start a blog? If so, what's your struggle? Let's discuss. I'm thinking about improvements in this domain.
If you're here for an idea: A minimalistic blog engine.
It lets you start writing articles right now. You choose some template and your website is ready to be presented. Later you can buy a domain and link it to the blog.
Why not other solutions for blogging? They're bloated with unnecessary features. The heavyweight Google Analytics? A few more tracking scripts? 50 features no one uses? Such a website loads for 3+ seconds, who likes that?
Idea: Cloud Factories
One of the largest “taxes” on goods that are purchased in person is the cost of shipping that product to its retail location.
Replacing “dead space” or “dying spaces” in malls with smaller, robotic factories that can decrease shipping costs for end-consumers; thus, decreasing the average price of goods or allowing merchants to sell less while still maintaining revenues. This business would be like Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchen business (which has already raised over $400M dollars). Cloud Kitchens are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery. This business would do the same thing with factories to either be delivered to end users or picked up “in-store” (really, just a store-front with a few items of clothing that you can try on for sizing, not for style). The thesis of this business would be that bringing the production closer to the end-consumer could actually reduce pricing.
Monetization: Subscription fee to be able to use these cloud factories. Perhaps a % per good sold.
💡Idea: Blog articles distribution
It's difficult to get views on a blog that doesn't rank well on search engines. You post an interesting article and no one is reading it. This distribution problem hit authors hard. They decide to stop writing.
How can we improve this? What if we have a platform where an author adds his blog, and the platform shows the articles to relevant people? One may state it's Medium, but no. First of all, you don't own the content there. Plus, Medium doesn't show the relevant content to people. For example, I wrote multiple posts there and got 0 views.
The platform will keep track of new articles in an author's blog by RSS. When a new material releases, the platform shows it to people. If people like it, the platform shows it to more readers.
There are painkillers and vitamins as analogies to the problems people pay to solve. There are critical problems(painkillers), and there are not such significant problems(vitamins). However, they aren't so black and white. Here's a good analogy I found on Reddit:
- TurboTax - painkiller
- Dropbox - vitamin
- LinkedIn/Facebook - methamphetamine (makes you paranoid and look busy without being productive)
- Fortnite - nitrous oxide (feels good but causes brain damage)
- Coinbase - vaccine (resistance to inflation)
- Oculus - lsd (transports you somewhere else)
- X1 - dental floss (finds the thing you know is there)
- Ad block - sunscreen (protects you from harmful bombardment)
- Reddit - cigarettes (an unhealthy way to kill five minutes)
Idea: Shareable bookmarks
A social app where users share their useful bookmarks for websites. They are be grouped by folders, labels, tags, and are searchable. Users can follow each other to read their bookmarks feed. The service can be integrated with the browser bookmarks addon.
One nice feature that might add more interactivity among the users is the possibility to ask others what websites they could recommend for X or Y.
Such a service requires you to attract users when there is not much activity(because of the lack of users) - the chicken and the egg problem that occurs on social platforms and marketplaces.
Idea: Hover and learn
A browser extension that randomly replaces some words on websites to be the words in the language you learn.
You can hover on the unfamiliar word and see a translation, pronunciation, songs containing this word, a few movie clips with it and other usage of the word in different contexts.
Example.
This helps by allowing users to browse the web and learn more effortlessly. Anyway they should do a mental effort to learn and you can determine how they'll do it. For example, add the hovered words to a vocabulary and show them to repeat and learn (spaced repetition).
Idea: Recaller
A platform to help you to keep knowledge of read articles, books, etc. by employing learning techniques such as writing questions when you're reading. Then answering them once per X period.
The platform shows the highlights you made, the questions and notes you wrote down.
Idea: Smartphone usage limits
An app for smartphones where you point out how much time a day you should have your screen enabled. Or time per one session.
Say, I want to limit my smartphone usage. So I configure this app to have only 1.5h a day, and when I spend all of it, I can't use my phone until there's an emergency(to use Google Maps, respond to a call, etc.). The other use case is when I don't know how much time per day I should limit, but I want to decrease smartphone usage time per session. For example, I may spend time watching YouTube or scrolling the Twitter feed, so I want to limit sessions to 5 mins.
The app may punish me if I exceed the usage. For example, it may block the distracting apps for the whole day. On the other hand, it also could reward me if I were obedient to the rules for three days: the app might give me additional minutes per session for the next day.
Of course, there are similar apps that block distracting apps. The problem is that they can be annoying, and you may decide to uninstall them. Or skip the warnings and notifications. Such apps should be more flexible and "smart" to help you. For example, a rewarding system might have a significant impact. Or the changing and insightful warnings if I violate the rules. So it won't show me the same message that I'm a terrible person, but it will tell something like: "if you continue spending additional time like you did today on YouTube, you'll waste <X> weeks per year".
Finding a problem
or How to find business problems and the ones you have
You're going to have to brainstorm. Some people recommend that you just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. I don't. That might take years, if not forever. Be proactive.
It's hard to say where the best place to start brainstorming is, not because there are so few, but because there are so many. There are thousands of good problems out there, and practically anything can trigger you to stumble across one.
What's more important is that you recognize a good problem when you see one, and vice versa. If a problem scores poorly on the guidelines above, don't waste your time. Keep brainstorming.
For that reason, it makes sense to start with one of these guidelines in mind, and let that be your trigger. For example, since it's helpful to solve a problem that you have yourself, why not take a look at your own life and see if you can spot any problems. What worries you, exasperates you, or annoys you?
The other guidelines also work well as brainstorming triggers. Who do you like spending time with? What groups are you a part of? What are some problems you notice people solving frequently? What's something that seems to be growing into a bigger trend?
My personal favorite is to start by looking at where people are already spending lots of time and money and go from there. Money changing hands is almost always a sign that there's a valuable problem being solved.
Avoid Fatal Mistakes
Founders typically have already made one or two huge mistakes by this point. If you can avoid these, you'll be way ahead before you've even started.
Starting with a solution in mind. I've mentioned this already, but it's worth repeating. You need to be honest with yourself here, because this is sometimes subtle. If you're already attached to a particular idea for a product, technology, or set of features that you want to build, that's going to ruin your ability to find a solid problem and analyze it objectively. You've put the solution first, and it's blinding you to opportunities.
Ruling out already-solved problems.
Nothing in the guidelines above says that a good problem is one that nobody is solving. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Almost all successful businesses start by tackling problems that have popular, pre-existing, alternative solutions. Way too many founders attempt to solve unsolved problems, then get stuck. These problems are often unsolved because they're unimportant and people don't care.
Being afraid to solve high-value problems. Indie hackers in particular are notorious for only tackling cheap, low-value problems. You don't have to sell something for cheap to have a chance at success. That's backwards. It's actually harder to sell cheap things, because people care less. I've bought more cars than back scratchers in my life. It doesn't matter that you're a small, scrappy startup. I've met 2-person teams selling their software for $10,000 per year per customer. Pick a high-value problem and charge a high price.
Not having a specific customer in mind. If you can't articulate whose problem you're solving, how is your website going to articulate it? If you want to wait and see who the best customer turns out to be, that sounds a lot like a key looking for a lock. If you think your product is for everyone, it's probably for nobody. If you describe your target customer by combining a bunch of attributes (e.g. "iOS users who need to get tasks done but prefer modern, clean UIs"), that's not an actual group of people. You're just describing the features of a product you're already biased toward building.
Some of these points are a bit counterintuitive. That's why so many generations of smart-but-uninformed indie hackers are repeating the mistakes of their predecessors.
But it's simple to avoid these kinds of mistakes once you know them. It's more a more a matter of knowledge and discipline, rather than genius or hard work.
Idea: Password change reminder
A feature in password manager apps or a new extension that notifies you about changing a password when you open a website. The tool proposes a new password and a button be clicked that will find the password change form and fill the data automatically.
It can be a separate browser extension though. It may also notify users when some breach happened or sensitive data is leaked somewhere. Thus, the extension's users will react first.
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Idea: Text rephraser
It is a service that allows you to rewrite a blog post and a copy to make it look and feel different. Or, maybe you create a new blog article and think about rewriting some old posts.
There are two types of solutions for this:
- Replace words with synonyms. In this case, the text and its structure are the same.
- Use ML tools that do the same, but they replace phrases and change sentences' structure.
We need something more like (2) but more advanced. Currently, such tools are limited, and you need to spend much time refactoring the text.
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I'm working on a new blog where I talk about Telegram as well.
Idea: Mobile game templates
A platform that provides templates to make a mobile game. By template, I mean an automated flow with pre-defined steps, visual effects, mechanics, but you can change them with your text, graphics, etc.
For instance, there are templates for text-based games where you can create a plot and a player takes particular actions that lead to a specific plotline. Like, an interactive book.
This platform may begin with one template and add other later, if necessary. Even creating games with one template would save developers a lot of time.
idea: Replacing faces service
My friend makes videos where he substitutes people's faces. He tried a few paid services, but there are problems: the video quality is low, the faces aren't replaced right.
So, the main issues are the quality of the video and the substitution. We might build a service that provides a better video quality which means higher processing time on a server. To leverage this issue, we could provide custom plans where users would choose video quality. For example, 720p is priced more than 480p. Notice that it's hard to render such videos and probably you'll need performant GPUs for cloud hosting.
The second issue is the quality of the face substitution. To handle this we could use custom parameters provided to end-users but simplified to their understanding. So the service can be used by not only programmers, video professionals, or deep learning engineers. Our target is regular people that aren't familiar with underhood face replacement magic.
There are some open-source projects for that, so probably you don't need to re-create a wheel. I guess it needs a custom configuration to handle various kinds of videos and faces to be handled in the service and to provide a friendly API for users.
Idea: A platform to craft courses and projects from most liked YouTube videos.
It solves following problems:
Why to opt for a paid course, if we can learn for free from YouTube.
YouTube has the best quality content, but they are not organized.
YouTube content is not organized in form of courses, where we can track our progress, meet the like minded people working on same course.
how my idea solves mentioned problems:
Our Aim is to provide the best experience of learning with free courses crafted from most liked videos.
We want to create a learning community by providing the free courses and projects.
The community will bring us the set target audience. We can use this audience for running the paid promotions or we can use them for our next ideas.
How it will help people:
My idea will help people get the same level of experience they get in paid courses that too for free. It will help them build their skills for their next job.
Idea: YouTube studio rent
A studio where people can record their YouTube videos without the need to buy all the stuff by themselves. As an owner, you may create an app to help bloggers scheduling the sessions, notify them about news, price/schedule changes, etc.
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Fit whole picture on Instagram without border
Idea: Trends monitoring by industry
A tool that helps you to see current trends divided by industry. They are aggregated from various sources such as social networks' activity, news, etc. Since such tools exist, not many of them provide a possibility to search for trends in a particular industry, category, niche, or all of that, plus a search term.
Idea: Entertain me!
A website that recommends you some activity to do when you're bored. For example, it hints you to listen to music(a specific playlist, group, or a song), if you like it, the system will recommend similar activities in the future. If you prefer other things to do in your current mood, it'll try to suggest to you other activities, like watching a specific movie, visiting an online museum, gallery, having a conversation with a person, or, maybe listening to music with a group of people online.
Idea: Pillow & blanket temperature regulation
Smart bed linen that regulates the temperature of your pillow and blanket when you need to. It monitors your sleeping activity. If it sees you need more warmth, it warms a pillow(blanket) up. Or cools it down.
It also cools down the bottom of a pillow by default before you go to sleep.
Idea: Auto presentations
A tool that converts information into digestible slides of a presentation. It should split the data wisely and extract the important parts. In such a way, it delivers only information that people would benefit from the most.
Why: it takes time to extract the important pieces of information from texts, charts, etc. Then, you need to pick a nice design for slides, fonts, colors. It can be automated.
Common reasons why startups fail by Failory.com:
- Marketing mistakes were by far the most common, and they were generally speaking the most deadly with 69% of all mentioned marketing mistakes being fatal. In fact, the fatal marketing mistakes were more numerous than all other fatal mistakes combined (56% vs 44%), as can be seen in the pie chart below. By far the most common reason for shutdown was lack of product-market-fit which constituted more than half of the marketing mistakes, but more on that below.
- Team problems – friction, lack of experience, lack of motivation, etc., were the second most common. They were some of the least-deadly percentage-wise (only 39% of all mentioned team problems being fatal), but because they are abundant they were still the second most common reason for shutdown.
- Financial problems and mistakes were the third most common. That said, bearing in mind more than 50% of the projects didn’t have any budget to begin with and more than 75% of the projects were self-funded, it’s a surprise that only 16% of the projects point at financial problems as the major reason for failure.
- Tech problems were extremely rare, which is surprising considering almost all projects in the data have a technical side to them. The most common remark was that too much time and effort was spent on tech that proved to be useless in the long run. The most common answer to “a thing you would do differently next time” by far was “I’d talk to customers and validate my assumptions before writing a single line of code”. That said, a big % of tech problems were fatal: e.g. relying on a 3rd party API that changes can ruin a business overnight.
- Operational problems were quite rare and not that deadly, but it’s important to mention that most interviewees ran software projects, so operational problems (e.g. suppliers, distribution) are not as common as in brick-and-mortar and physical product projects by definition.
- Legal problems were rarest, mentioned only four times, but two of those four proved to be lethal. For most early-stage startups the legal side is a non-factor. Yet, there are still industries where you can’t afford to ignore it (food, finance, etc.).
Idea: AI swimming coach
A swimming pool that has this automated system that watches how people swim, analyzes their movements, counts total swimmed distance and other related metrics. It gives everyone personal recommendations.
Idea: Advanced keyword planner
That helps you to choose popular keywords that in use by not so many competitors; proposes alternative keywords; shows who those people (age, gender, preferences) who search the keywords.
There is a Google Keyword planner, which is free and provides good numbers on what's going on in search. The only issue you should know the keywords you want to research and you should then research the websites' domain authority scores that appear on the first page on Google.
Of course, there are Ahrefs-like solutions, but they won't suggest you a niche, keywords that are not competitive at the moment, or steadily grow and will be competitive in ~2 years.
Idea: Learning a language by songs
An app to learn a language vocabulary(mostly) by songs. It matches words with songs that have them. Thus, it becomes better to memorize vocabulary. As you know, songs can be highly attached and easy to recall.
Resource: Y Combinator Startup Library
This is a huge golden gem of the resources for founders and people who think to start something, change, improve, succeed.
They consolidated the information for 15 years and give it to you! Prepare a few days or weeks to read/watch the materials!
Idea: Video editing tool
Not just an idea, it's a trend. People seek simple video editing software. Of course, there are a lot of them. But you can create an app aimed at niche users. For example, tiktokers. Or, courses tutors, students in Asia, etc. The video tools we have currently are for the wide public and oftentimes they're full of unnecessary things, UI is complex and rendering/preview is slow. Is there a space for improvement? For sure.
You may dive deeper and create something like an app that edits short videos by adding a music track, a few visual effects, it allows uploading directly to TikTok. Aimed at tiktokers from Germany.
Opportunity: Health care optimization
How many industries do you think can be optimized by involving technology to increase their efficiency?
For instance, let's take the health care system.
As described by TechOpinions, “the actual medical care system is not significantly more efficient than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, there are now electronic medical records, and some consumers have access to their health history online. But the process of booking appointments, getting a referral, determining the price of a service, or determining the efficacy of a physician or the quality of a hospital or other treatment facility remains a rather arcane process.” While capital intensive, is there a potential alternative or opportunity to roll up a healthcare system in a rural part of the country and begin experimenting with tech optimization? There are currently over 6,090 hospitals in the United States with 2,946 Nongovernment Not-for-Profit Community Hospitals and 1,233 Investor-Owned (For-Profit) Community Hospitals. Given that there is a market, this business would double down on capturing a larger more efficient share of the investor-owned community hospitals that exist.
We had an idea posted here about ERP systems that are super outdated, expensive, time-consuming, but health care units use them because of a conservative monopoly in the market. There are still businesses in, for example, rural areas where you can implement such a system, which will be not so expensive, more efficient, user-friendly, and yield profits.
💡A potential solution to the previous post's problem: Just give me a blog.
TL;DR: combine all the tools bloggers use in one place and simplify all of them for non-technical people.
There are many parts of it, I'm breaking them down:
1. A potential blogger wants to understand if this activity is for him/her. ("Can I make money with my blog?", "How it'll look like?", "What opportunities will be opened for me after I start blogging?"). Hence, we should organize bloggers' stories. Tell people how some person started blogging and made $400 from ads after a year, what do publish about, what was their initial goal. Tell people how the other person didn't earn anything after 2 years, but publishing regularly about animals' diseases and thus helping a science community. Also, this person was offered a job. And many more such various stories: how do some earn money from ads, the others earn by allowing sponsor links, etc. How others were given interesting opportunities like a job. Or, met great people on the Internet. What do they publish about, how frequently, what are their blogs' statistics, etc. Wannabe bloggers should understand what to expect and if this activity is for them.
2. If the person decides to start a blog, then the solution should simplify the whole process:
a) no separate service to buy a domain. Check the domain availability and buy it instantly there, on our imaginary solution's website.
b) choose a blog's website design also there: many templates for many use cases. Choose one and see a preview immediately on the bought domain's address.
c) at this point, the blog is ready. Now it's time to customize it.
3. The solution set up an admin space for the author. With a dashboard, built-in website analytics(speed, SEO issues, visitors count, etc.), tools to write a post, check it with Grammarly-like tools(spelling, synonyms, overall readability). Also, there are other great-value SEO-related tools:
- to analyze competitors' blogs, see what do they publicize about, how many visitors and earnings do they have;
- analyze a niche an author wants to publish in: what are the popular keywords, what sort of articles do people look for, estimated visitors for every article, and many more metrics.
Here's what my process looks like, though I'm a technician:
- I search for and buy a domain. No big deal.
- I set up a server in a cloud(DigitalOcean): I run a Ghost blog container there. Not a big deal for me, but it takes time, and is a big deal for non-technical people. Of course, others may choose something else(other blog engines).
- I "connect" my bought domain to a server in a DigitalOcean panel. Then, Nginx configuration and SSL certificates setup(for HTTPS traffic).
- I connect Google Analytics for website metrics. But ideally, I'd go with something else. Many people and some browsers(like Brave) block GA. Thus, the website visitors' count isn't a complete number. For other websites, I use umami(open-sourced, free), and it requires another server and a bit of coding(putting a script to pages).
- I use many SEO-related tools to do keywords research, analyze my niche.
I update my blog engine periodically, change a theme design, text, or something else. Plus, spell-checking for every post(not only Grammarly but other tools).
Overall, it takes time for a technical person. Imagine how much time such a solution might save for non-technical(and technical) people.