3 ms·
My side project when I was a teacher was https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com and it has been my full-time work for 7-8 years. A place I’ve
by stevesearer 6y ago
My side project when I was a teacher was https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com and it has been my full-time work for 7-8 years.
A place I’ve found to be good for idea hunting is the website for the city I live in which has all sorts of interesting and useful information that is often organized horribly or hard to find.
One example was that they published crime statistics organized in a table by the types of crime and district. On a separate page in a pdf was a map that showed the boundaries for each district.
My idea and project was to create a map where you could see where in town particular types of crime happened most.
Based on that idea, my office mate came up with the idea (though not implemented) to find data about bike accidents and map them to streets to see if there were any hotspots that might be particularly dangerous for cycling.
Ideas seem kind of iterative so once I have one idea and expertise in that area, I can’t help but think about other similar problems to solve with my new knowledge.
An example is that because my main job is based around organizing architecture projects and photos, I noticed that during the process of planning my wedding it could be interesting to have a website filled with bouquets organized by the flowers that are in them.
While not a successful business, I learned some new things and ended up implementing concepts to my main business.
- theasteve 6y agoWow I'm impress by your project. I'm curious were you working on this just for fun or you had a problem you were trying to solve? It is awesome, I started browsing and spent a good amount of time looking at offices. Did you start the project with the want to generate revenue or is that something that just later came? Right now I'm super passionate about bikes. I been riding my fixed gear Cinelli bike all around NYC and I thought building something around that but I just can't seem to find a problem worth solving with software.
- stevesearer 6y agoThanks! I made it for fun on a whim after seeing some photos of Google’s HQ and then not being able to find a place to browse other offices. It was more for fun and my first advertiser actually contacted me. One idea I want for running (that translates to bikes) is a map where I can log where I have run to see what areas in my city I haven’t visited as I enjoy the exploratory nature of running. There are plenty of places to log single runs, but seeing them all at a glance would be interesting. Edit: a quick google search shows me this exists :)