Back in 2008, Y-Combinator threw out a list of startup ideas they thought would be interesting to see and followed up with a more formal request for startups in a few key areas. A few days ago I recounted a list from May 2009 where a VC listed areas he could see room for innovation. Earlier this year, not long after we got back from WWDC, I posted a forum called Ideas Café to a group of friends who were on the WWDC trip and populated it with a few ideas that I’d come up with, simply in order to see what could come out of it. I’m not a developer (and likely will never be) but I have plenty of ideas.
Earlier today ReadWriteWeb came up with 6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed.
I know there are developers out there in my community who have said to me, “Yeah, I can write code, but I don’t have an ideas on what to write.” or something similar. There’s a gazillion ideas out there – if you’re not sure about something, ask.
Back in the nineties when I was writing my books, I remember having to sit and pitch the story to a friend of mine who, at hearing the tagline, wasn’t interested. For two minutes I explained the premise and at the end created a fan who not only promoted the book at every turn but wrote an incredible amount of supporting material.
There will be ideas like that out there. Concepts that when you first read them they’ll be kinda wooly. So talk to people about them. Talk to me. Turn up at one of the many OpenCoffeeClub meetings in your region (we have around 6 different OCC geographies in Northern Ireland alone). Maybe someone can give you that two minute pitch to make you insanely enthusiastic?
Cambrian House was built upon that concept, as (to a certain extent) was My Dream App (whatever happened to that?). Nowadays, I have ideas all the time that I know are in the order of magnitude of $10-$100m if executed correctly. Hell, even just a decent custom software house with a good sales team is a $100m business.
The two key things for me now are that (a) the idea has to be capable of being a $1bn business eventually, even if it never makes it there and (b) it has to be something that I’m passionate about. I’ve been around the block enough to know that custom software development for the Fortune 500 does not excite me.
Augmented reality, on the other hand, got me out of bed at 4am this morning.
Aha, but you would just be a massive geek. 🙂