1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task...
2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can.
3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible.
Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook for people who use Groupon.
OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods.
1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how people cooked and baked using measuring cups.
2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their cup.
3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to read the level.
So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions of their new measuring cups in 18 months.
They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many newer more complicated things around us today that could use the simplification above.
Here's a picture for those (like me) that couldn't quite picture it from nate's description: http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-2-Cup-Angled-Measuring/dp/B0...
AC
I implemented a task I need and sold it for about $100,000 total to other people.
That's a rule - if you have a problem - chances are - lots of other people have the same problem for solving which they'd be more than happy to pay.
1) Find repeatable operations that distributed users can perform.
2) Achieve scale by helping the users become more efficient (technology) and effective (empathetic).
E.G. Uber, Airbnb
[1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...
What do you want out of this?
Suggestions for finding (and validating) ideas for new webapps/projects are all over; you might check into those.
Two simple projects I'm needing:
- A Tumblr like app where I can post / tag / search the link s I stumbled upon in my daily browsing (with screenshots?). - A secure but simple commenting engine that I can attach to any of my pages (spam / attacks detection; confirm / delete from links in mails).
Of course I need them as free software. And I'm probably going to work on them soon.
2. Why not Disqus?
In both cases, I want the software to run on my own server.
an application in which you keep track of your fridge's content (throw a cam driven barcode scanner in there) and suggests meals to cook based on the lowest investment (stuff not in your fridge) taking into account the store closest to you (can throw a little location based feature) your favourite meals sorted desc based on a custom rating (client specific rating db?)…
should keep you busy for a while? B-)
If you want to do something audio related, you can use an API that I built out http://audiour.com/api There are a couple things I want to rework before officially releasing it into the wild, but you can start using it now if you're interested.
EDIT: Its alpha 2.0 is built on Laravel and is a complete rebuild.
I've had one running on Pagodabox for a while now that's still only mostly done. I look forward to seeing yours.
[0] http://fluxbb.org/download/releases/1.5.5/fluxbb-1.5.5.zip
Sorry, I guess I was mistaken - the currently alpha FluxBB 2.0 is Laravel, the current one (1.55) is a fork of something else.
Fluxbb looks pretty nice though.
If not, I'd say create a webpage for a charity organization that cares for the environment or children or poor people etc.
A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.
This is more of a "fun" project in realtime, but historical weather data is actually very valuable for things like energy price prediction, and is pretty hard to get. I don't know what the market is like, but there is almost definitely one (I would be a customer if the data is accurate).
Terrible advice.
The correct time to learn a new language is when your current one isn't meeting your needs or when you've completed enough projects to have learned as much as possible from your current language and can start bringing in ideas from others. Endlessly learning new languages and never using them is completely backwards.
In the last couple of years, I have learned a number of other languages and frameworks, mostly whatever the "hip" folks are using (Zend, RoR, Django, Ember, Backbone), and of these the only thing that really is useful on a day to day level has been the python scraping framework, Scrapy.
Each of these systems has brought me new ways to think about PHP and Javascript code that I never would thought about if I was solely intent on solving the problems I had at hand as best I could in the PHP idioms used by WordPress and this bespoke web framework.
For instance, I certainly wouldn't be as comfortable with the map functions if I hadn't done just that little bit of playing Haskell that I did.
So in my case, learning other idioms for programming, even those which I don't apply directly, has been tremendously useful in understanding better ways to work with the systems that I have to work with in a day-to-day situation.
Also, ideas are very subjective :)