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Ask HN: What will help me come up with startup/app ideas?

• marketgod 8y ago
  I tried to start many different platforms in the past only to be in the same predicament as you. What worked for me, may help you. What are you passionate about? Is there a service that offers something that you are passionate about but doesn't do it as good. The one thing I always tried to do was create something unique, something that doesn't exist in the market. However, with that mentality, it became really challenging to get users because people hadn't heard of it, also, I wasn't able to target the customers of an existing product. Do you have capital at your disposal? Buying advertisements and paying for marketing makes it easier. Further, charge something from day one is really important, I think, obviously it may stop you from being a widely used social network, but if someone is willing to pay for it, it has value and can help you grow it through what you are paid. Further, it's really motivating when you get paid for something. I used to offer services on a freemium model and when people aren't paying for something, they forget about it, this may not always be the case as there are many viral websites which are free. In my situation, I love trading, I was making a career out of it, and a lot of websites were offering services. However, their services would focus on penny stocks, or they would post hundreds of alerts. They would sometimes get into some plans but you never knew. What I did was focus on high market cap stocks (GOOGL/AAPL/AMZN/TSLA) as people look at these. Also, I started looking at stocks which can potentially be high market cap stocks in the future (AMD/TWTR). I posted plans for options trading for these stocks and I got into all my plans. I went a step further by showing people when I got in and when I got out. This provides me a unique marketing opportunity because many services aren't transparent with their trades. I plan to go a few steps further as the service evolves to differentiate from the competitors. In your case, which of your products have competitors? How can you differentiate from them? Which pain point can you solve which they don't? I like the habit tracking app, it is rather cool. However, there are apps for this which I think are easier to use. For example, if you know that I generally exercise on weekdays at 7 am (because my GPS is showing that I am near a gym), you could send a push notification asking me to update my status if I am not at a gym. This is something similar I was looking for in a spending application, which would alert me when I leave a place I could potentially buy something. I.e. I was a at a restaurant for 90 minutes, I must have spent something, so when I am leaving, a notification asking me how much I spent? In your case, if you have "Good Diet" as a habit, then if I am near a Starbucks/Tim Hortons, it can send me a notification. On my desktop, you may need to have an addon on my browser to track my usage of social media sites and alert me into the habit tracking application. Being privacy conscious is something I don't think is important if you are adding value. Basically you have an awesome skill set so adding value added applications to the habit tracking would be neat, but then you will be investing a lot of time into the entire ecosystem/platform. Lumiverse is neat. It has some great videos. I just want to leave that on my TV and let it loop. Maybe that would help it retain users? There is probably an overhead to adding users and maybe you can't monetize it with advertisements as Youtube may shut you down? I am uncertain there, but it's nice finding good/curated lists of videos. A paint point I have just to add for Youtube, is sometimes I want to search "Stock Market Services" on YOutube and play all the videos in the search result. Youtube doesn't allow that, so maybe allow looping of a search term, in your case search doesn't exist, therefore it is harder to find, but the categories are really neat, maybe let me play a whole category at once. However, this may lead to feature creep so you would probably need to balance it somehow. Keep shipping, you can't win if you don't play. Your products are nicely designed, look at my website, it's horrible looking in comparison. Also, maybe back link your other sites on each site so people can go through your different products? Not sure if that will help. Sidenote: https://rayalez.com https://rayalez.com doesn't load but http://rayalez.com http://rayalez.com does via redirect. Similar for webacademy the links are not working.