How To Find And Choose An Idea For Your Project | Hacker News Reader

How To Find And Choose An Idea For Your Project

tbbuck.com

6 pointsmootothemax6 comments

Cool article and interesting suggestions on where to come up with ideas...I tend to come up with ideas while I'm in the middle of working on projects. My most recent idea came to me several weeks ago when I found out I had several Giftcards from last year and had a painful time trying to get the balances on all of them, and then GiftcardMate was born.

Isn't the mother of invention necessity? Need something, and then make it happen!

I see that you yourself have had many necessities based on your profile, so I'm sure you have no shortage of ideas

Hehe, it's true: I do come up with a lot of ideas. Viable ones, on the other hand...

Yeah, I've had many ideas over the years, some of which never made any ground...this new night-time/weekend project I'm working on I think could be really useful though as a lot of people tend to get many Giftcards around the holidays and managing balances on all of them can be a pain -- what are your thoughts? Viable or not? Monetization could be done by offering a buy-back service on Giftcards that users don't want, by offering 80% of face value and then reselling to make a small profit while charging less than the cards actual value

I'd be interested in hearing your opinions -- my post last night seemed to get no responses, I'm really just looking for some constructive criticism on the idea and validation or invalidation, either way really

Have you got anybody to agree to give you money for using your service? Friends/family/pet dog? If so, go ahead!

Also, what's your strategy for getting users to use your site? The idea itself might be fine, but unless you have the marketing side worked out well in advance, you could be making life difficult for yourself :)

That's the thing, I suck at marketing.. programmers aren't known for Design or Marketing skills and that's been my biggest hurdle. The incentive to use the service based on the giveaway would work, but I don't know what marketing channels to pursue. It would remain a free service, but making money in the future would be to offer a buy-back program whereby the users can sell their unwanted Giftcards for cash (less than the cards face value) and then I would mark it up a bit while still making it less than the cards actual value, so that would be the monetization plan, but again marketing for me seems impossible and always has been

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