Take my app ideas

https://austinhenley.com/blog/takemyappideas.html

by jermaustin1 • 4 years ago

112 98 4 years ago

joeatwork• 4 years ago

The Glide app, which takes spreadsheets and makes them into full featured apps and websites, fits the bill of one of these ideas. https://www.glideapps.com/

spencerchubb• 4 years ago

The first one is basically notion

joegahona• 4 years ago

This was my first thought too. I use this all the time for this reason.

jacknews• 4 years ago

lol, only 5 fairly crappy/generic/obvious ideas, one of which is presumably too good (or way too crappy) to share? Sorry to be harsh, but you can keep them.

I always maintain that ideas can be valuable in themselves, against the repeated VC argument that 'ideas are worthless', but this is an example where the VCs are right.

kanonieer3• 4 years ago

At first, this comment comes off as harsh but then considering the author's tone which essentially feels like him gracing the readers with a sprinkle of what he presumably considers a worthy charity.

Some people are so full of themselves that they don't even realize how crass they might come across.

bryans3• 4 years ago

Some people are so full of themselves that they don't even realize how crass they might come across.

An appropriately ironic comment, given that you just arrogantly belittled someone while also accusing them of narcissism, despite the author plainly writing that they don't claim any of the ideas are good. Next time RTFA before spouting inflammatory nonsense.

"I'd rather give my ideas away than let them go to waste. Who knows if they are even good? The hard part is the execution anyway."

sixQuarks• 4 years ago

You’re getting downvoted but I agree with you. Too many people have ideas where they haven’t thought about monetization and/or they have no domain expertise.

I’ve never seen an actual good biz idea that someone was willing to share online

hunterb123• 4 years ago

Noone said these were for a business.

These are app ideas. You don't have to monetize everything, some things can just be for fun / rep / learning / sharing / etc.

bentossell3• 4 years ago

The first idea on the list: “ Create an auto-updating website from a Google Doc or Sheet” can be done pretty easily already, without writing code.

(I’m the founder of a company, Makerpad[*], that teaches people no-code)

Glide[1] - lets you create apps from a google sheet. Set up the template connected to your data and as it updates, your app will too.

Stacker[2] - build web-apps without code. Supports Airtable and most recently, Sheets.

Softr[3] - similar for websites but using Airtable as the data source. I think Sheets support will come soon.

Sheets2Site [4] - website builder with google sheets.

For GoogleDocs you can use parameters in the doc that change using something like Zapier (disclaimer: they acquired my company last year). I haven’t explored it the other way around eg. Data into a google doc updating something elsewhere.

[0] https://www.makerpad.co/ [1] https://www.glideapps.com/ [2] https://www.stackerhq.com/ [3] https://www.softr.io/ [4] https://www.sheet2site.com/

behnamoh• 4 years ago

just a quick feedback: your logo is very similar to Medium’s. in fact, at first I thought you used Medium, in line with the company’s mission to avoid code!

Vladimof2• 4 years ago

His logo is an M and Medium's logo is a globe?

bentossell3• 4 years ago

Yeh never great with logos so just used an ‘m’ - haven’t had any issues yet…

dheera2• 4 years ago

A few others

- Neighbor wrath saver: Constantly listen for shower and other bathroom noises and shut off any alarms if the user is deemed to be inside the bathroom and unable to reach the phone.

- Maps optimizer: Constantly listen to the accelerometer and if you determine the pattern to be the person running and there is a Facebook or Google calendar event starting within 30 minutes, automatically start navigating to it. If there are multiple simultaneous events in the calendar, try to determine which one the user is running towards and help the user reach that particular event. But also listen to the microphone and stop navigation if the user yells "shut up". Increase the font size and button size as well if the user is trying to operate phone while running.

- Caltrain ticket optimizer: If your GPS location is approaching a Caltrain station and the train is due to arrive within 3 minutes such that you're worried about purchasing a ticket in time, automatically download the Caltrain app and purchase a ticket for you so you don't have to fiddle with the machine. Work with Caltrain Inc so that it can unpurchase the ticket if you don't actually board the train

- Laundry optimizer: Automatically listen for sounds of laundry machines starting and remind you in 35 minutes later if it's the sound of a washer starting, or 45 minutes later if it's the sound of a dryer starting

- Cooking optimizer: Use front camera to determine if the user's hand is full of flour, oil, egg and if so, enable voice control of the UI of sorts e.g. "scroll down slightly", "kill that popup", "don't lock screen for the next hour" etc.

- Use the phone as a bluetooth mouse using the flashlight, rear camera, and accelerometer to determine motion on the table.

...

stardenburden• 4 years ago

Everything but the last idea seem very annoying, prone to failure and highly battery-draining

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

Why not just use wordpress + wysiwyg editor similar to *docs, and you're done?

bentossell3• 4 years ago

I dont really like using WP. Lots of alternatives out there that do great stuff.

vageli• 4 years ago

Now you have to set up accounts and manage wordpress versus sharing a google doc or something similar.

potatolicious• 4 years ago

- I'd have to set up the WP instance and maintain it. I'd have to manage the account(s) on it. I'd have to manage the plugins and all of the sundry parts of running a web service.

- The WYSIWYG editor isn't as good as GDocs (or Word, or insert other popular apps)

- Collaborative authoring is a pain. GDocs has this built in, via accounts everyone already has.

The utility of ease of use/low-friction/lightweight-ness can't be overstated. Getting rid of even a small amount of friction from systems often pays itself back exponentially.

benoror• 4 years ago

Checkout baseql.com to generate a GraphQL endpoint from Google Sheets

monkin3• 4 years ago

All of your ideas already exists. It’s not about having ideas or sharing them, because there’s thousands of people who have the same thought. What actually makes a difference is building them.

ntoskrnl• 4 years ago

I'd say what actually makes a difference is sharing/marketing projects after you build them. If other people don't know your project exists, you'll end up with no users and you'll see your idea on various "stuff I wish existed" lists. Then one day you see a clone of your project and think someone ripped you off, when in reality they never heard of you and they were just better at selling themselves.

monkin3• 4 years ago

That’s the whole process of building them.

MathCodeLove• 4 years ago

Comments like your express an unfortunately common, yet incredibly reductive, sentiment. Execution of course matters. But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important. A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.

monkin3• 4 years ago

There’s nothing reductive in my comment. I didn’t mention the quality of execution, yet you have to build something to learn from it, even if it’s a bad idea. Having just ideas bring nothing to the table, no matter how good they are. Here we come to another interesting fact: companies will pivot many times after building the initial idea.

fleetwoodsnack• 4 years ago

Yep, and reformulations of similar ideas also tend to introduce subtle and nuanced changes that make for substantive distinctions.

slightwinder• 4 years ago

But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important.

Disputable. Many people have many ideas. Just the mass alone diminishes the general value of ideas.

A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.

Also disputable. For the evaluation, result matters most. And a bad idea which still solves a problem, is better than a good idea which just exists in its own isolated bubble, doing nothing worthful.

The tech-world is full of fancy oversmart ideas and their implementations. Yet many of them fail because neither a good idea, nor some half decent implementation alone have enough worth to survive.

lelanthran• 4 years ago

A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.

That'd be something I've never seen. Any examples?

loxias4• 4 years ago

A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.

One of the maxims I adopted from a mentor was that good execution of a mediocre idea will beat poor execution of a great idea. So far, it's been true everywhere I look.

We're surrounded with decent execution of horrible ideas.

Meant with all due respect, but.. I think you've got it backwards? Great ideas have no innate value, they're easy to come up with.

travisjungroth• 4 years ago

I like when people share their ideas.

bogwog• 4 years ago

I have ideas that I don't share with people that I know would be able to build them. Posting ideas I'm interested in on a site like this, for example, is not something I would do.

Ideas are worthless on their own. Building them is what matters. This takes time and skill. Most people on a site like this have the skills to build on an app idea, but everyone has varying levels of time. So if I post an idea here, there's a good chance someone with more time than me will read it, and might steal it. If I sit on the idea until I eventually get around to executing it, then the chance of someone beating me to market is much lower.

The worst thing that could happen is that I never build it, and no one else does either, so the world misses out. That's personally less of a problem for me than watching someone steal my idea.

MarcelOlsz• 4 years ago

I tell everyone my ideas all the time. So far nobody has ever built them. The lesson I learned here, is that I am actually an idiot. Maybe you should share your ideas. You might learn something as well.

JadeNB• 4 years ago

So if I post an idea here, there's a good chance someone with more time than me will read it, and might steal it.

I think describing the process of telling someone a good idea, and having them act on it, as "stealing" your idea is not necessarily a healthy way of thinking about ideas.

loceng• 4 years ago

Building them and then people being aware they exist.

loxias4• 4 years ago

Amen to this. I've worked in enough exciting startups to know that having good, great, even amazing ideas are pretty easy compared to execution. I love great ideas, and great idea companies. But they're not hard.

More valuable would be prescient knowledge of social trends, a team that's really good at execution, or knowledge of some existing pain point that still doesn't have a solution.

ivanmontillam5• 4 years ago

For the 2nd one, if Twitter is really a "protocol" one could tweet special crafted links and make a Twitter client app that parsed these links and Twitter threads and using something like ffmpeg to compile a single audio stream.

If more replies are added to the conversation, one can rebuild the ffmpeg audio file locally. This could be awesome for blind people, and a big win for accessibility.

Please note I'm not talking about text-to-speech systems, I'm talking about the autors speaking in specially crafted tweets (that results in audio files saved in some server and them some app parsing them as a single file).

The 3rd one already exists.

Windows can track the Clipboard history, at the Clipboard settings, just enable it and start using the "Windows logo key + V" key combo to open the clipboard context menu and select any of the latest copied items (including images).

The Samsung keyboard at Android also does this as well.

Maybe there's something like this for Linux and Apple equipment, I don't know.

The 4rth one I tried using the Web Archive to retrieve it, but it wasn't available. haha.

The 5th one exists as an app called Chklsty[0]. What you're needing is checklists for repeated processes. It's not for single-use to-do lists.

[0] https://hello.chklsty.com/

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

Windows can track the Clipboard history

They aren't asking for a generic clipboard manager (that are numerous) but one that can log only URLs. A more flexible implementation will be for the manager to include filter functionality for what it logs. Afaik none has this.

belkarx3• 4 years ago

The clipboard history idea can be done in ... around 5 minutes in Linux (using clipnotify, parcellite, echo, and grep). Ironically this is the project the author claimed would take far longer than 2 hours.

ivanmontillam5• 4 years ago

5 minutes in execution, but more than 2 hours in preparation (knowledge gathering, etc.)

The hidden cost of execution is preparedness.

belkarx3• 4 years ago

... https://gist.github.com/belkarx/299b6d83a85beee2c2559c1b42f9...

I will admit that I'm using almost exclusively external tools and had I wrangled the X library myself, this would have taken longer. And while it's technically a working product, it's not exactly polished. But it proves my point. Not a difficult project

bilater• 4 years ago

1st is Sheet2Site 2nd is Twitter Spaces 3rd is one of a million premium clipboard chrome extensions

kodablah• 4 years ago

Take mine too: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues

woojoo666• 4 years ago

These are way better than the ones in the post imo

thenerdhead2• 4 years ago

The ironic part about free ideas is that there’s many people who have productized ideas as a newsletter you pay for. Ideas are dime a dozen. Execution is what matters. Hardly anyone will even embark on an idea let alone do it well.

hardwaresofton3• 4 years ago

Guilty as charged

https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io

Though my reasoning is more that I know I’ll never get to executing on all the ideas I have so I hope someone else can validate and execute

codazoda• 4 years ago

How do you monitize this, since it’s free to sub?

pie_flavor• 4 years ago

For the clipboard one, I use ClipboardFusion. Some of the most intuitive software I think I've ever used, second only to Microsoft Office.

seanlinehan• 4 years ago

For idea #2, check out Attention: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1574914307

motohagiography3• 4 years ago

Whenever I see twitter/social clone ideas I think of a bar game from my snarky too-clever-by-half friends and I used to play in the 90s, we called "pitch it," where you had to express a tv show or movie as the pitch the writer made.

Some gems included:

- A guy and a sass-talking car fight crime together.

- Seven Samurai meets the Equalizer, but with american war criminals.

- Screwball comedy but with homages and tropes instead of sight gags and jokes, with an ensamble cast of has beens doing swan song performances.

When I hear about twitter clones, the pitches for platforms become the jokes we make about them:

- a way for old people to yell at each other.

- bully safari, where you can go to antagonize people without conseqences.

- a way for people to share pictures of their butts.

- Orwell's 'two minutes of hate'

- a fame simulator where robots flatter you

- a place for smart people to act stupid

- warcraft for passive aggression

These are mostly empty snark, but some of them can be funny, and they take us out of thinking that we should re-make something we have today with some minor augmentation, independent of the original context it was created, and start looking at what something genuinely new might be.

scubbo• 4 years ago

My guesses:

- Knight Rider

- Maybe "The Expendables"?

- No idea, but I feel like I want to watch it!

helm33• 4 years ago

- Maybe "The Expendables"? -> Pretty sure this is "The A Team"

rcurry• 4 years ago

I came up with a fun game that’s along the line of your snarky movie game. I call it Mixed Up Movies, where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one. You write the description and provide the real actors and the other folks have to guess the name of the movie.

For instance:

Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.

Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?

Dirty Harry and The Hendersons

Or:

A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.

Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?

The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.

Or:

The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.

Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?

Casino Royale With Cheese

dan-robertson• 4 years ago

The stupid game along these lines that I like is to describe a made up film with a title that rhymes with some known film by modifying the description of the film, e.g.

Dominic Toretto and his street racer friends go around making some ridiculous claims.

An FBI agent must enlist the help of a killer to catch a dangerous fiend, who's crime is shushing people on public transport.

An archaeologist/adventurer is hired to venture inside a proton to see what particles he can find.

loxias4• 4 years ago

where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one

You might enjoy Says You (public radio show). They do this category from time to time. Most recently 2 weeks ago, SY-2630, round 3, starts at ~20:30 in. :)

yjftsjthsd-h2• 4 years ago

If you haven't seen it yet, you might enjoy https://screenrant.com/tag/pitch-meeting/

tomcam• 4 years ago

So much yes. IMHO this is some of the most consistently hilarious material I have ever encountered.

loxias4• 4 years ago

I'm curious about the last 4! (penultimate one: "HN comment section"?) ;-)

motohagiography3• 4 years ago

I'm a bit earnest about HN, but if I were to roast it by back-pitching it as a startup, I would say something like:

- a place to be wrong on the internet

- reddit, but with hope

- well.com/../actually

but finally,

- something to appreciate

garrickvanburen• 4 years ago

“Wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas are far less valuable than “here’s a daily frustration I have and I’ve yet to found a satisfactory solution”

ben_w2• 4 years ago

“TODO/did do” is also on my, ah, to-do list. And, likewise, has been for years now.

In the meantime, I’m using Apple Notes and copying the result into a Markdown file whenever it gets long enough to start noticeably confusing the Notes.app scroll bar (about once a month).

jagged-chisel• 4 years ago

Geekbot does this on Slack. Granted, it’s a standup meeting replacement, not a journal input bot.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

It seems to me that a particularly formatted Markdown or LaTeX file would be a totally reasonable way to implement TODO/did do. Just have space for "TODO" and space for "did do." What else would an app add? Maybe a reminder (but a phone alarm could be a perfectly decent reminder).

ben_w2• 4 years ago

Reminders yes, also recurrent tasks.

bartaxyz• 4 years ago

I've started building something like the last idea. I call it very simply Daily Tasks[0]. It's by no means finished yet, but it does feel good to have an idea validated by reading about it from this blog post.

[0] https://ondrejbarta.com/pet-projects/daily-tasks

6510• 4 years ago

I never share the good ideas. Reasonable ones I share but only with the right person. The response is often moaning. Not very useful.

The list is not very good but if we all post one of those mythical "easy to come by" good ideas that everyone is having simultaneously.... (hah)

My idea would be "take my ideas app" an app where people can share their startup ideas. Nice categories, each topic is an idea. Replies are either 1) text 2) a link to a similar service 3) a link to a product or service useful for implementation of the idea with a text explaining how 4) useful contact details that can be accessed if you attempt to build the idea.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

Pretty sure the “REDACTED” one is just for effect. The way back machine has the page archived from two days ago and doesn’t show any changes.

azhenley2• 4 years ago

The post is nearly a month old.

mentos• 4 years ago

I know ideas are a dime a dozen but can anyone recommend what the best market for ideas is?

errantmind• 4 years ago

Thinking app ideas are worth anything is naive. The nuance encountered while 'executing' dwarfs their significance. Anyone who has built anything knows this.

The faster we collectively realize this, the faster we'll be able to reign in the excesses of IP law.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

Thinking app ideas are worth anything is naive.

lots of people are saying this here, I agree, pretty much, almost all the time, because almost all ideas are ideas that people have had. Especially when they are product ideas.

But on the other hand, whenever I hear this ideas are worthless, I do get a reflexive kick in my gut against conventional bullshit that everyone has agreed to believe in to fight against the old fashioned bullshit people used to believe, which was that ideas were valuable in themselves. And when I get that little reflexive kick in my gut I think, amazingly these people have never heard about pagerank.

I mean sure, without a good execution they wouldn't have anything, but the idea was definitely worth quite a bit more than "hey what if we made Yahoo, but improved the execution a bit?"

corobo• 4 years ago

<p>4. Good try.</p>

Haha. Someone had to try looking at the git history, figured I had nothing better to do

sprior• 4 years ago

Someone proposed the second idea to me once. My immediate thought was of all the careers that would be ended as a result of it being too easy to share that random thought that went through your mind.

floucky• 4 years ago

Guys, I have the best (but also the worst) idea: an application where you can rent toilets !

__del__• 4 years ago

i've given it a bit of thought over the years, and a reputation system that accurately represents the stinking realities of letting someone use your toilet, and can identify creeps who'll listen at the door or video the entire event, seems to be the most difficult thing to solve. it seems like such a service would work well in civilized countries like mexico, and be an absolute shit show in the united states.

LaputanMachine• 4 years ago

Some app ideas from Krzysztof Kowalczyk (author of Sumatra PDF): https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d815...

xuding• 4 years ago

Create an auto-updating website from a Google Doc or Sheet: I created https://sitefast.live to solve that problem. The main difference between SiteFast and the other solutions is that it separate design from data clearly, so you do not mess you data(google sheets) with the site design.

spoonjim• 4 years ago

LOL. None of these ideas are significantly better than a “Jump to Conclusions” mat.

Take my app ideas

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