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I tried to tackle this problem, or atleast the problem of helping people find ideas. I built http://oppsdaily.com http://oppsdaily.com and http://oppslist.com h

I tried to tackle this problem, or atleast the problem of helping people find ideas. I built http://oppsdaily.com http://oppsdaily.com and http://oppslist.com http://oppslist.com. They're both now sunset and I'm no longer sending emails out or updating the platform. I will say that ideas are generally far less valuable than a first customer. My readers told me time and time again that they wanted to be connected to someone who would pay for the idea. That is the real challenge, and if you can figure that out, you're going to have a booming business. And I think there is opportunity in the space somewhere between e-lance and just "ideas". Some kind of platform that matches a developer and an initial customer in a way that rewards both. Finding these people is a challenge, but I think it's possible, and the person who figures out how to do it is going to have a MASSIVE business on their hands. I could go on about this a lot further, but I wholly recommend exploring it. I'm onto my next project now, which interestingly is helping people find investing ideas. We launched yesterday so we'll see how it goes. If you want to chat about the idea space - cory @t topstonks.com or check out the the new project its at http://topstonks.com http://topstonks.com. Good luck!

jcadam 7y ago
> Some kind of platform that matches a developer and an initial customer in a way that rewards both. Finding these people is a challenge, but I think it's possible, and the person who figures out how to do it is going to have a MASSIVE business on their hands. I could go on about this a lot further, but I wholly recommend exploring it. I'd pursue it, but I wouldn't know how to go about finding a first customer for the platform :)
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Haha, this is "THE" great question. Maybe if you can find a way to siphon off demand from another platform, like craigslist or someplace? I think about it a lot!
asdf333 7y ago
love the name. good luck
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thanks :) My cofounder wanted to name the project "wall street dungeons" or WSD, which I also thought was pretty funny. We'll see how it goes!
halfeatenpie 7y ago
I was one of the early subscribers of Opps Daily! I loved the idea originally when it came up but after a while, the daily emails got a bit much. I believe I suggested a weekly version/aggregate over a daily email (which you immediately implemented). Watching it from the outside, I'd say after a while it became "the ideas are decent/worth looking into, but I already have too much on my plate right now that I can't pursue any of it" and the aspiration to follow through is pretty much gone. I think monetizing based on that (and making it worth the time investment) is the big egg we all want to crack. Anyways props for you for running it for so long! I saw the email and appreciate you taking us on your journey through the lifecycle of it.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thanks for coming along for the ride :) I think you're right. There might have been more value in sending out one idea a week and vetting it really well.
  - dgellow 7y ago
    What about pushing it a bit more, and doing it once per month? Each month 1 idea + ~1 month of research to back it up and what makes it a great one worth of consideration. If you can share the idea directly with some initial market research, etc, that's a great value for people to start working on something.
RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
'ideas' -"We found you some investing ideas. We just didnt tell you what kind of ideas they were"
hooande 7y ago
topstonks is hilarious, well done it's sad that this version of oppsdaily didn't work out, but I think this is a valuable concept. there is a very small market of people who are looking for startup ideas and side projects, but a larger group of customers who would pay to be set up with the services that are peripheral to starting a company. if you try to approach this concept again, I would subscribe
stanmancan 7y ago
Sharing idea's are pretty useless in general, if you're not excited enough to work on your own idea, why would someone else be excited to work on it? I'm curious if people posting things they NEED would be more functional, along with a bounty. Other people who also want it can contribute to the bounty. Anyone can work on the idea's and the bounty is awarded to whoever solves it first/best. (I think you would need some sort of oversight to make sure the bounty is awarded to the rightful solution). "$1,500 - An API that lets me send send snail mail by posting a PDF and address to an endpoint" Maybe it slowly gets up to $4,000 with 15 other people contributing to the bounty. That's finally high enough that someone solves it, posts it, collects the bounty, and already has 16 customers.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Someone actually developed an MVP of this concept. It was really highly upvoted on hacker news but I can't remember the name of it. I don't think the project ever got off the ground, but I can say it was definitely a popular idea amongst developers. So you'll have no problem getting that side of the equation to show up. It's finding folks with a problem and some money that is the challenge. But if you figure it out you're gonna be in a great spot!
  - cvhashim 7y ago
    Inkit? Pretty cool product https://www.inkit.com/ https://www.inkit.com/
  - rtb 7y ago
    A quick search for "send letter online" shows there are at least 2 or 3 companies that offer this currently.
- Jarwain 7y ago
  There's a site I used to look at that does something similar called mindsumo. They do more than just tech problems though, and the solver doesn't really maintain ownership
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
samcheng 7y ago
Cory, I really enjoyed reading your "Opps Daily" emails. Even though I, like many others, never acted on any of them. Thanks for your effort here!
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thanks Sam, that means a lot :) Onwards!
otras 7y ago
I subscribed to oppsdaily for roughly two years. Thank you for running it! While my stars never aligned to work on any of them, it was great to see real problems that were out there.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed it :)
wpietri 7y ago
I'm curious: who, if anybody, was your first customer for the opps* projects? I'm a person with a big idea surplus, so I'm sure you had the supply end nailed. But who's on the demand end? This may be more related to my personality, but I just don't know anybody who ever is in the state of, "Gosh, I want to do something but have no idea what".
- cdiamand 7y ago
  The folks on hacker news are always looking for ideas to turn into a project. I had a few folks actually build the ideas that came through on the newsletter. That was really rewarding to see.
kevan 7y ago
>I will say that ideas are generally far less valuable than a first customer. My readers told me time and time again that they wanted to be connected to someone who would pay for the idea. DemandRush[1] had this model. You'd post ideas along with how much you were willing to pay for it. It looks like the website[2] was shut down sometime in 2019. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/demandrush https://www.producthunt.com/posts/demandrush [1] https://www.demandrush.com/ https://www.demandrush.com/
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Yep! That was the one. I even had a phone call with the developer. Really great guy!
HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
Those sites do exist in a way, but you have to do the customer acquisition work yourself. There are many technical forums where people ask "how do I do X" or "can anyone help me with Y?" There's often opportunity there to provide a paid solution. Sometimes it's explicitly asked for, other times you have to find out if the poster is open to paying for a solution. I've been doing this for a while and I generally pick up a few small projects each month, but it takes some time before you get good at seeing which ones are real opportunities and which are just people looking for DIY guidance. I suspect that if a free site to do this were to emerge, it would quickly end up with the same issues as eLance, Freelancer.com and the rest: race to the bottom on price. To more specifically address the OP's question: in the past I tried using RentACoder for product ideas by datamining the job postings to see if there was enough overlap in requests that would indicate a product need. Never came up with anything concrete that I wanted to work on :-(
steakin 7y ago
" "I haven't read it, but I bet it's great." Jonathan R., CFA and Investor " Hahaha, you're great.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Hahaha I was wondering if anybody would read that!
xeroaura 7y ago
Btw, the TOS/privacy policy are both just links to support(?) email.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Great catch! We're still very early. The landing page is not completely dialed in yet. Going to get SSL, privacy etc set up in the coming days, and then do a proper launch.
pascalxus 7y ago
Good on you for attempting to solve this problem. This part of your comment is absolutely key and worth repeating: "My readers told me time and time again that they wanted to be connected to someone who would pay for the idea. That is the real challenge"
thesehands 7y ago
Thanks for opps daily, i was a subscriber and enjoyed thinking through the problems posted but as with others here was too busy to commit pen to paper on any of them. good luck with topstonks.com
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thank you :)
Giorgi 7y ago
I was opps daily subscriber too, but all the ideas were from people that do not know how to Google.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! :) Yep, a fair amount of these folks should have done a bit of research!
AQuantized 7y ago
Just my opinion, but I think you need some sort of immediate display or realtime feed of the number of stock mentions you're tracking. For me personally, it's the sort of thing that sounds interesting but that I'm probably not going to sign up for an email to explore at some arbitrary point in the future. I don't get the 'idea' of selling ideas, however. Surely to be willing to pay for an idea, you'd want to know what it is. And to know what it is would mean you wouldn't have to pay for it. The only solution I can see to that is some sort of sci fi phenomenon, like entering a room with an 'ideas guy,' whose ideas you evaluate and can agree to buy, before having your memory of what happened in the room wiped.
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Great feedback! We'll likely be setting up some kind of platform to show realtime data in the next few weeks. The value I hope we provide is in summarizing and simplifying major trends in these often overlooked, and sometimes sketchy places. So you don't have to wade through a massive amount of content, that is sometimes offensive, in order to understand what people are talking about.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Same, I am curious too so I just decided to (shameful plug) create an email and reply to any requests for now at get_an_idea@protonmail.com for ideas with some details regarding your background, field of interest, and motive.
scarejunba 7y ago
I contributed an idea to one of these and was contacted by someone who wanted to contract with me to build a tool. That's not what I wanted. I didn't want to spend $15k to get someone to make something for me. I wanted to say "this is annoying to me. If that gives you a hint as to something that you could build, that's awesome: I'll pay you $7 / month". What I definitely did not desire is a bespoke solution. I can go get that from a contracting website. What I also definitely didn't desire is wanting to research things so I can create a nice opportunity for you. That's a waste of my time. I can just pay someone on Upwork to research for me.
codegeek 7y ago
FWIW, I really loved oppslist.com. It was fun to visit it almost every other day (I am obsessed with ideas lol). If you ever want to bring it up, would love to help in any way possible.
el_dev_hell 7y ago
> We track the most mentioned stocks on 4chan and WallStreetBets Just make sure you choose a Personal Risk Tolerance That Works For You.

jcadam 7y ago

> Some kind of platform that matches a developer and an initial customer in a way that rewards both. Finding these people is a challenge, but I think it's possible, and the person who figures out how to do it is going to have a MASSIVE business on their hands. I could go on about this a lot further, but I wholly recommend exploring it. I'd pursue it, but I wouldn't know how to go about finding a first customer for the platform :)

cdiamand 7y ago
Haha, this is "THE" great question. Maybe if you can find a way to siphon off demand from another platform, like craigslist or someplace? I think about it a lot!

asdf333 7y ago

love the name. good luck

cdiamand 7y ago
Thanks :) My cofounder wanted to name the project "wall street dungeons" or WSD, which I also thought was pretty funny. We'll see how it goes!

halfeatenpie 7y ago

I was one of the early subscribers of Opps Daily! I loved the idea originally when it came up but after a while, the daily emails got a bit much. I believe I suggested a weekly version/aggregate over a daily email (which you immediately implemented). Watching it from the outside, I'd say after a while it became "the ideas are decent/worth looking into, but I already have too much on my plate right now that I can't pursue any of it" and the aspiration to follow through is pretty much gone. I think monetizing based on that (and making it worth the time investment) is the big egg we all want to crack. Anyways props for you for running it for so long! I saw the email and appreciate you taking us on your journey through the lifecycle of it.

cdiamand 7y ago
Thanks for coming along for the ride :) I think you're right. There might have been more value in sending out one idea a week and vetting it really well.
- dgellow 7y ago
  What about pushing it a bit more, and doing it once per month? Each month 1 idea + ~1 month of research to back it up and what makes it a great one worth of consideration. If you can share the idea directly with some initial market research, etc, that's a great value for people to start working on something.

RosanaAnaDana 7y ago

'ideas' -"We found you some investing ideas. We just didnt tell you what kind of ideas they were"

hooande 7y ago

topstonks is hilarious, well done it's sad that this version of oppsdaily didn't work out, but I think this is a valuable concept. there is a very small market of people who are looking for startup ideas and side projects, but a larger group of customers who would pay to be set up with the services that are peripheral to starting a company. if you try to approach this concept again, I would subscribe

stanmancan 7y ago

Sharing idea's are pretty useless in general, if you're not excited enough to work on your own idea, why would someone else be excited to work on it? I'm curious if people posting things they NEED would be more functional, along with a bounty. Other people who also want it can contribute to the bounty. Anyone can work on the idea's and the bounty is awarded to whoever solves it first/best. (I think you would need some sort of oversight to make sure the bounty is awarded to the rightful solution). "$1,500 - An API that lets me send send snail mail by posting a PDF and address to an endpoint" Maybe it slowly gets up to $4,000 with 15 other people contributing to the bounty. That's finally high enough that someone solves it, posts it, collects the bounty, and already has 16 customers.

cdiamand 7y ago
Someone actually developed an MVP of this concept. It was really highly upvoted on hacker news but I can't remember the name of it. I don't think the project ever got off the ground, but I can say it was definitely a popular idea amongst developers. So you'll have no problem getting that side of the equation to show up. It's finding folks with a problem and some money that is the challenge. But if you figure it out you're gonna be in a great spot!
- cvhashim 7y ago
  Inkit? Pretty cool product https://www.inkit.com/ https://www.inkit.com/
- rtb 7y ago
  A quick search for "send letter online" shows there are at least 2 or 3 companies that offer this currently.
Jarwain 7y ago
There's a site I used to look at that does something similar called mindsumo. They do more than just tech problems though, and the solver doesn't really maintain ownership
HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago

samcheng 7y ago

Cory, I really enjoyed reading your "Opps Daily" emails. Even though I, like many others, never acted on any of them. Thanks for your effort here!

cdiamand 7y ago
Thanks Sam, that means a lot :) Onwards!

otras 7y ago

I subscribed to oppsdaily for roughly two years. Thank you for running it! While my stars never aligned to work on any of them, it was great to see real problems that were out there.

cdiamand 7y ago
Thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed it :)

wpietri 7y ago

I'm curious: who, if anybody, was your first customer for the opps* projects? I'm a person with a big idea surplus, so I'm sure you had the supply end nailed. But who's on the demand end? This may be more related to my personality, but I just don't know anybody who ever is in the state of, "Gosh, I want to do something but have no idea what".

cdiamand 7y ago
The folks on hacker news are always looking for ideas to turn into a project. I had a few folks actually build the ideas that came through on the newsletter. That was really rewarding to see.

kevan 7y ago

>I will say that ideas are generally far less valuable than a first customer. My readers told me time and time again that they wanted to be connected to someone who would pay for the idea. DemandRush[1] had this model. You'd post ideas along with how much you were willing to pay for it. It looks like the website[2] was shut down sometime in 2019. [1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/demandrush https://www.producthunt.com/posts/demandrush [1] https://www.demandrush.com/ https://www.demandrush.com/

cdiamand 7y ago
Yep! That was the one. I even had a phone call with the developer. Really great guy!

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago

Those sites do exist in a way, but you have to do the customer acquisition work yourself. There are many technical forums where people ask "how do I do X" or "can anyone help me with Y?" There's often opportunity there to provide a paid solution. Sometimes it's explicitly asked for, other times you have to find out if the poster is open to paying for a solution. I've been doing this for a while and I generally pick up a few small projects each month, but it takes some time before you get good at seeing which ones are real opportunities and which are just people looking for DIY guidance. I suspect that if a free site to do this were to emerge, it would quickly end up with the same issues as eLance, Freelancer.com and the rest: race to the bottom on price. To more specifically address the OP's question: in the past I tried using RentACoder for product ideas by datamining the job postings to see if there was enough overlap in requests that would indicate a product need. Never came up with anything concrete that I wanted to work on :-(

steakin 7y ago

" "I haven't read it, but I bet it's great." Jonathan R., CFA and Investor " Hahaha, you're great.

cdiamand 7y ago
Hahaha I was wondering if anybody would read that!

xeroaura 7y ago

Btw, the TOS/privacy policy are both just links to support(?) email.

cdiamand 7y ago
Great catch! We're still very early. The landing page is not completely dialed in yet. Going to get SSL, privacy etc set up in the coming days, and then do a proper launch.

pascalxus 7y ago

Good on you for attempting to solve this problem. This part of your comment is absolutely key and worth repeating: "My readers told me time and time again that they wanted to be connected to someone who would pay for the idea. That is the real challenge"

thesehands 7y ago

Thanks for opps daily, i was a subscriber and enjoyed thinking through the problems posted but as with others here was too busy to commit pen to paper on any of them. good luck with topstonks.com

cdiamand 7y ago
Thank you :)

Giorgi 7y ago

I was opps daily subscriber too, but all the ideas were from people that do not know how to Google.

cdiamand 7y ago
Thanks for reading! :) Yep, a fair amount of these folks should have done a bit of research!

AQuantized 7y ago

Just my opinion, but I think you need some sort of immediate display or realtime feed of the number of stock mentions you're tracking. For me personally, it's the sort of thing that sounds interesting but that I'm probably not going to sign up for an email to explore at some arbitrary point in the future. I don't get the 'idea' of selling ideas, however. Surely to be willing to pay for an idea, you'd want to know what it is. And to know what it is would mean you wouldn't have to pay for it. The only solution I can see to that is some sort of sci fi phenomenon, like entering a room with an 'ideas guy,' whose ideas you evaluate and can agree to buy, before having your memory of what happened in the room wiped.

cdiamand 7y ago
Great feedback! We'll likely be setting up some kind of platform to show realtime data in the next few weeks. The value I hope we provide is in summarizing and simplifying major trends in these often overlooked, and sometimes sketchy places. So you don't have to wade through a massive amount of content, that is sometimes offensive, in order to understand what people are talking about.
thrwaway69 7y ago
Same, I am curious too so I just decided to (shameful plug) create an email and reply to any requests for now at get_an_idea@protonmail.com for ideas with some details regarding your background, field of interest, and motive.

scarejunba 7y ago

I contributed an idea to one of these and was contacted by someone who wanted to contract with me to build a tool. That's not what I wanted. I didn't want to spend $15k to get someone to make something for me. I wanted to say "this is annoying to me. If that gives you a hint as to something that you could build, that's awesome: I'll pay you $7 / month". What I definitely did not desire is a bespoke solution. I can go get that from a contracting website. What I also definitely didn't desire is wanting to research things so I can create a nice opportunity for you. That's a waste of my time. I can just pay someone on Upwork to research for me.

codegeek 7y ago

FWIW, I really loved oppslist.com. It was fun to visit it almost every other day (I am obsessed with ideas lol). If you ever want to bring it up, would love to help in any way possible.

el_dev_hell 7y ago

> We track the most mentioned stocks on 4chan and WallStreetBets Just make sure you choose a Personal Risk Tolerance That Works For You.