Ask HN: How do you come up with new project ideas?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dogfooding also tends to help you create better products.

pg wrote an essay about this method of idea creation, found here: http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

I tend to agree with this method most strongly. The first goal of any new product/service is to find a small group of passionate and dedicated users. If you can be one of them, you've already got a head start.

> 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.

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.)

"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... ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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)

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.

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.

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. :)

>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

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 :-)

I don't run around looking for ideas.

I try to solve real problems.

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.

"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.

how do you locate real problems?

In my case, I tripped over them. I always hated the common advice that before you can understand a language, you have to "use it in anger." I.e. you need to use it to build something real, where you'll inevitably run up against some weird construct that frustrates the hell out of you as a beginner. I just couldn't think of anything worth building.

In the last year, however, I've had three ideas. I think two of them are at least sort of decent (the other is kinda crappy, but since it was the first one, I was in love with it for a while because I finally had an idea!). These two were just things I discovered I wished existed. I just sort of tripped over them.

The first of the "good" ideas came when I thought I was going to have to move across the country (Canada). I found what looked like a popular site for finding apartments in my would-be adoptive city. The interface turned out to be horrible, with little to no proper search abilities. This was incredibly frustrating because my girlfriend smokes (nasty habit...) and we have a cat. Without proper search, I just ordered available apartments by ascending price, and go through them one by one to see if I could find something decent. I actually got so fed up with it, that I ran wget on the site and grepped the shit out of it to try to make my own limited search. Also annoying was that sorting by price sucked, since many had extra fees (animal deposit, animal rent, parking, etc.) that weren't included, and you would often find a one bedroom listed that had details in its description saying, "oh, we also have 2bd for this price, or 3bd for that price" so even limiting your search by room count wasn't reliable.

That was sort of rambling, but the point was it was painful enough that I just decided I would build a better mousetrap for that city, using the funds from my shiny new job. Well, I never got the job, but the idea stuck that there are a lot of less than ideal apartment search sites out there, so maybe the market could use my better mousetrap.

After that, I had a battle with RSI leaving me coding-disabled for a bit, and I came up with a new project that I'm building now (literally now - I'm procrastinating by writing this reply) that I liked better. In fact, the new idea was borne of the old idea, since it's related to learning programming and based on my desire to learn more to build the first site.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that inspiration comes from the damnedest places, but it seems to often be rooted - at least for me - in just a sincere desire to have something that doesn't exist, to solve a problem you have encountered.

Think about your daily life, or just keep your eyes open for the next week, and analyze the things around you. Are there any tools/resources you wish you had access to, but don't yet exist? Build them! Have you used something recently that was more painful than it needed to be? Improve it!

It's not easy for everyone, it certainly isn't easy for me, but there are opportunities out there if you just keep an eye out for them.

Best of luck.

* And if you really get stuck, just build my damn apartment site. :-P

I think to ensure success you need to pursue solutions to problems you actually care about. Unless you have significant time or cash resources I don't think you could get far just picking things you think would be good ideas.

For instance, I wouldn't last 5 minutes starting a project to help potential or new immigrants, recovering drug addicts, or yacht owners. Even though I think those may be valuable niches for solutions, I have no investment in the outcome. I would have no way of judging progress or success without taking someone else's word for it.

I don't think there is any lack of problems you care about if you think hard enough, and if that fails, just take a walk around your neighborhood, your home, your job. Something will piss you off/inspire you soon enough.

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

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