Something you wish you had or a process for something you do in your personal or professional life that's long and tedious would be good places to start. Is th

Something you wish you had or a process for something you do in your personal or professional life that's long and tedious would be good places to start. Is there something you do a lot that feels clunkier than it should be? Is there a way you could automate a chunk of it? Maybe other people would like that automated also. Another thing is, what is some data you wish you had access to or could record easily that keeps track of useful things about your activities or your life, something that you can't think of (or quickly google) some good solution for online? That might be a direction to go in. Like, for example, on a lark I spent some time aggregating reviewers Top 10 Board Game lists in various categories, and it triggered an idea that maybe there could be some software that facilitates this sort of data aggregation for various top 10 lists. I haven't done anything with that (and probably won't), but it's an idea I had. I mainly focus my brain on coming up with game ideas and story ideas, so those aren't necessarily trying to come up with some website or service I can sell. I either look for some sort of constraint (Can I come up with a game that only exists in 1 dimension? Can I come up with a game that only has one type of component? Can I come up with a game that only uses 9 cards? I've designed games for all three of these in the past two years), or just pretty much anything I absorb, I try to think if I could make a game or story out of it, especially if my brain goes "oh that's interesting!" for whatever reason. I'll think about it for awhile, and try to run with whatever I come up with, at least up to the prototype phase, and then get the idea in front of people, and if people seem to dig it (or even if they don't, if they gave me some good feedback or I still feel there's gotta be something there if I can find it) I'll develop the idea further. Sometimes me trying to fix a bad idea generates other ideas as well. I've tried to improve a particular game design twice, and the mechanical fixes I came up I realized would work better as different games where the focus was on that mechanism, and I've since prototyped those as well. You could probably do something like that for side projects as well.