I’m taking a year off to live off my savings and work on an idea, but I don’t have one (or maybe I have many)
So I’m asking for your help to list ideas you want to see happen but don’t have the time to make happen yourself, I’ll then pick one and try to execute it. I’ll also blog about the process along the way so you’ll be able to follow (and hopefully give feedback along the way)
It will be like an open startup studio driven by the community.
Thank you!
So many people are working with data professionally, and there are hundreds of solutions for analytics, data warehouses, time series databases, etc.
Yet getting data from one silo to another is annoying, and usually requires writing complex scripts to transform data from one format to another. If you're not familiar with something like Python that will be very difficult.
I'm thinking of things like this:
- download data from a REST API and store in a CSV file
- scan log files and put data into Redshift
- copy data from MS Access to PostgreSQL
- extract info from email messages and store it in a spreadsheet
There are solutions to some of these problems, but I think there is a huge opportunity in this space. Right now a lot of data science still requires a lot of irrelevant technical knowledge, and a powerful GUI could allow people to focus more on what they want to do rather than how to do it.
There was no generic solution although I've ended up reusing a lot of code.
One of the first gigs I got was to process about 7,000 pages from a static website, scrape out the relevant data, and plonk it in a database so they could run queries on it. :)
You could probably latch onto a common use case and build a solution for that e.g. Blogger to Wordpress transfer - something I've had to do in the past by building some custom tools. (That was years ago though - I've not looked at current state of play with regards tool availability). Not suggesting that would be your use case though - just an example.
Once I have a list of all the issues, I need to make one request per issue to get further details that aren't included in the original list.
Then I need to extract data from all the downloaded JSON files and combine it into a table.
It's conceptually not a hard problem, but it takes a lot of trial and error to do that if you aren't very familiar with Python.
I wish there was a nice GUI where I could just click a few buttons to do that. Designing that GUI is probably not easy...
Any more examples you can share?
I can't imagine anyone being successful with someone else's idea.
If you want to take a year off for fun or any other reason that's fine of course.
1. Uber for private tutoring/students. I live in a university town and there's plenty of college kids wanting to teach schoolkids.
2. Random story/character generator based off tropes.
3. Punch card for babysitting, especially for the late night tiers that babysitters are reluctant to charge extra on.
4. Recipe app, focused on instant things like bread makers and pressure cookers.
5. Github but for recipes (this is really just an excuse to make fork puns)
6. A chat with anonymous strangers community, similar to Omegle, except you post something similar to a tweet, and people can chat with you based on it. So you could make a post complaining about your boss, or how happy you are to get a job, then someone can chat with you about it. My main worry is that this could degrade into 4chan and it would be an uphill battle to moderate it.
7. Gamification productivity app. Probably just a checklist, ala Habitica, or it could be integrated with Pomodoro Technique.
Also, googling "github for recipes" brings up a number of options as well.
Look for problems to solve. Problems are goldmines.
On this subject, Peter Diamandis is brilliant> http://podcast.diamandis.com/2015/10/19/episode-11-problems-...
From all this research hopefully you will get a better feeling for which of your ideas are worth following up, and their potential.
The time to quit and do this is when you have some customers and revenue, a plan, and need the time to grow it. Take a vacation, start it, and get your first customer, and work on it in your free time.
Why take a year if you are clueless as of what you want to do? Do some traveling and air your head. If you still cannot find something you want to do, go back to your 9-5 job.