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Dear HN, Currently, I am stuck in a long-term project and really had the desire to build and finish a small app - I guess some of you can relate. So this week

by julvo 9y ago

Dear HN, Currently, I am stuck in a long-term project and really had the desire to build and finish a small app - I guess some of you can relate. So this weekend, I built Wishminer, a little tool which searches social media for app ideas that people wish for. I hope it can be helpful to some of you. It's fairly basic and nowhere close to perfect, but I would appreciate your advice on how to improve it.

chris_st 9y ago
Cool! Interestingly, I'd seen a product on indiegogo that kinda answered one person's wish, so I tweeted it to them (so that idea is out :-) And no, I'm not gonna say what it was, I'd feel like I was product-spamming here.
- julvo 9y ago
  That's great! This way I guess both sides could benefit, people looking for product ideas as well as people searching for solutions :)
- Regardsyjc 9y ago
  I'd love to learn more about what consumer products people are interested in. I'm always looking for consumer trends and new product ideas. I analyze a lot of products for my Amazon business especially now that I've started getting into manufacturing my own products, so I could definitely use a service that can help gauge consumer interest in social media and quantify it.
ecesena 9y ago
Two ideas: 1) clustering similar ideas, for example when I looked at it there were multiple about finding friends. Related, you could build an reddit-style ranking instead of a purely temporal one 2) if you want to turn it into a product, maybe a way to share “hey, this is exactly my app”... saw some similar comments here. Probably you’ll have to work on anti-spam too :) Good luck, great project so far!
- zaarn 9y ago
  1) could probably be achieved reasonably by filtering out keywords from the sources and simplify them ("app find friend" or "app sell item") and generate tags based on that.
  - kamac 9y ago
    1) you could also try to use word embeddings for distance. Afaik they work better than bag of words when few words are present in one observation.
- julvo 9y ago
  Thanks for your ideas. 1) would be a really cool feature, but also technically quite challenging. 2) Could potentially also be helpful as email alerts, so that an app maker gets notified when someone wishes for his app so that he can reach out on Twitter. Commenting on Wishminer itself will probably not be seen by the 'wisher'.

by julvo 9y ago

chris_st 9y ago

Cool! Interestingly, I'd seen a product on indiegogo that kinda answered one person's wish, so I tweeted it to them (so that idea is out :-) And no, I'm not gonna say what it was, I'd feel like I was product-spamming here.

julvo 9y ago
That's great! This way I guess both sides could benefit, people looking for product ideas as well as people searching for solutions :)
Regardsyjc 9y ago
I'd love to learn more about what consumer products people are interested in. I'm always looking for consumer trends and new product ideas. I analyze a lot of products for my Amazon business especially now that I've started getting into manufacturing my own products, so I could definitely use a service that can help gauge consumer interest in social media and quantify it.

ecesena 9y ago

Two ideas: 1) clustering similar ideas, for example when I looked at it there were multiple about finding friends. Related, you could build an reddit-style ranking instead of a purely temporal one 2) if you want to turn it into a product, maybe a way to share “hey, this is exactly my app”... saw some similar comments here. Probably you’ll have to work on anti-spam too :) Good luck, great project so far!

zaarn 9y ago
1) could probably be achieved reasonably by filtering out keywords from the sources and simplify them ("app find friend" or "app sell item") and generate tags based on that.
- kamac 9y ago
  1) you could also try to use word embeddings for distance. Afaik they work better than bag of words when few words are present in one observation.
julvo 9y ago
Thanks for your ideas. 1) would be a really cool feature, but also technically quite challenging. 2) Could potentially also be helpful as email alerts, so that an app maker gets notified when someone wishes for his app so that he can reach out on Twitter. Commenting on Wishminer itself will probably not be seen by the 'wisher'.