HACKER Q&A
📣 balzss

Is there a platform for sharing ideas that people want to “give away”?


I'm in the camp of "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything". Not in a literal sense, obviously, but I definitely have more ideas than time for executing them. Most of them are fun little thing or tools that would be helpful but not enough to actually do them.

I would like to submit them somewhere and maybe someone likes it and wants to create it. Or maybe I could get input why it's a stupid idea or how to improve them.

It would be also nice to see others' fun ideas. Maybe find a collaborator to work on them together.

Are you aware of such a platform? If there is none, what do you think about the concept?


  👤 cdiamand Accepted Answer ✓
I tried to tackle this problem, or atleast the problem of helping people find ideas. I built http://oppsdaily.com and 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. Good luck!


👤 pjmorris
I'm reminded of the Halfbakery [0]

"The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression." [1]

[0] https://www.halfbakery.com/

[1] https://www.halfbakery.com/editorial/about.html


👤 wpietri
For a while I ran an event called Pitchosaurus. We'd get together in the evening with beers. The general structure was:

Someone pitches the core of an idea. The idea can be either serious or ridiculous, but they should always pitch it as if it were serious.

Then everybody else, one at a time, proposed amendments or amplifications. These too may be serious or ridiculous, but they must be done in a "yes and" [1] style. No criticism is allowed (although add-ons may of course address a perceived flaw.

Eventually, when the amendments stop coming, a brief discussion of the idea and related topics is allowed. When that runs down, start again.

It was a lot of fun. I stopped doing it for life-happens reasons, but I'd encourage anybody to pick it up and run with it. It might be possible to capture the spirit in a website as well. Feel free to email or tweet at me if I can be of service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...


👤 jcadam
There are a lot of us with the technical chops (and/or can get a team together) to make a good software solution/product/service that are stuck on step 1: Identifying a real problem that companies will pay money to have solved for them.

I wish there was a place/service that would connect businesses with real problems (that they either can't or would rather not solve in-house) with aspiring (tech) entrepreneurs. I'm sure there's a large number of such opportunities out there, probably in industries/domains most software devs don't have much experience in and wouldn't think to explore.



👤 NateEag
I just maintain such a list on my website:

http://www.nateeag.com/software/ideas.html

I haven't tried to publicize it at all (well, until this post).

Start the list on a website somewhere, and if you want people to look at it, submit it to HN, Reddit, et al.

That should give you everything you need.

Not everything needs to be a platform.


👤 xwowsersx
Products that people wish existed are usually (not always) terrible ideas. There's no barrier to just blurting out something you wish existed - you know, something you want to exist, but you definitely won't be building and can't promise you'll use and definitely won't pay for. There's literally nothing holding you back from stating something that you wish existed even if it's just a tiny thing that you personally want in this specific moment for this specific use case.

👤 pjeziorowski
I've just started an opensource project (platform) that closely matches your idea. We gathered over 60 people interested in contributing on Slack in just two days.

A quote from my post on dev.to where it all started -

"A platform where people can express their app wishes (e.g. "I wish I had an app for X and Y") and vote up other people's great ideas.

Developers can use Appwish to keep track of the most wanted apps and features. They can assign themselves to projects, create dev teams and collaborate to fulfil people's needs.

In the future, the platform could also introduce elements of fund-raising or voluntary donations for the most appreciated developers and teams."

At the moment we are on stage of planning features/architecture and the development will start soon - we got frontend developers, backend devs, devops, a few designers and even mobile devs. + We were offered free hosting on one of startups offering managed Kubernetes clusters.

If anyone is interested, I can share our Slack channel/Github URL - we put everything in public anyways :)


👤 mynegation
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideasdrop

Producthunt link instead of a direct one so you can check “related” as well.


👤 samsquire
I've got my list of ideas here; https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

👤 SilasX
I thought that Kickstarter/Indiegogo had effectively become this. A common complaint is, "hey, I launched a Kickstarter, got funded, and some Chinese factory stole the idea!"

My response is always, "so? Aren't those sites more for 'I wish this existed so I could be a customer' than 'I want to personally profit from this idea'?"

So, yeah, if you don't care about someone stealing it, you might be able to repurpose Kickstarter that way:

1) Start a KS for the idea.

2) Wait for someone to steal it.

3) Cancel and refund everyone's money.


👤 karlicoss
I keep mine on my personal blog https://beepb00p.xyz/ideas.html

In fact one of main drives to write for me is to spread ideas on other people so someone else works on them!


👤 scotttheamazing
We have a podcast that covers these kinds of ideas! Basically every week we give out million dollar business ideas and encourage people to steal them!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steal-this-idea/id1472...


👤 hananbo
I've built https://willpayfor.com scratching my own itch. You're all welcome to share ideas there, please also mention how valuable a product or service idea might be or specify how you think it should be monitized

👤 iloveitaly
Here's a twitter-sourced list of product ideas:

https://www.requestforproduct.co


👤 ken
I appreciate the sentiment, but at the same time, most ideas are worthless. Even if you had knowledge of some successful system of today, went to an alternate universe that lacked it, and described it to them in detail, the team would still screw it up. It's not their baby. They need a leader who gets it, not just an idea dump.

Recall the story of Bezos and his challenge to let customers order from Amazon "with a single click". His team's first prototype required twelve clicks. He sent them back to work, and the second prototype required two clicks. It's not a question of complexity, because ideas don't get any simpler than that.


👤 mindcrime
Dig through the HN archives... I'm pretty sure that some variation of the basic idea of "a platform for sharing ideas that people want to give away" has been developed about 100 times over the past 10 years or so. OK, maybe not quite 100, but this seems to come up fairly often, and I'm pretty sure I remember more than a few people saying "I'm building a site to X" where X is pretty close to the above notion.

👤 DannyDover
The podcast, Steal This Idea, does exactly what you are looking for. The hosts and their guests come up with most of the ideas, but listeners can submit ideas as well: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steal-this-idea/id1472...

👤 elicash
A more honest way to say "ideas are worthless" would be to claim that there's no such thing as a first mover advantage.

Here's a take that looks into that question fairly: https://hbr.org/2005/04/the-half-truth-of-first-mover-advant...


👤 nabnob
Follow up question - Does anyone have advice for changing your mindset so you actually notice a potential idea when you have some pain point? I feel like I ignore my own ideas that seem insignificant. It just isn't a reflex to think "hey I should write a program to solve this".

👤 kamranahmedse
I am not aware of such platform but you can just create a GitHub repository and dump your ideas there.

Alot of people especially new developers are looking for project ideas; you can just put your ideas there and share the repository in /r/learnprogramming or similar subreddits.


👤 sne11ius
Live your idea ;)

I built https://egghead.space exeggdly for this - absolutely some pun intended ;)

Just look at this awesome idea: https://egghead.space/sketch/iKGw9vQ9Qmub39Djz1ZR/Fallout+4+...

I never managed to bring it beyond alpha stage though and no one ever used it.

Main problem for me was that I always got the feeling it looked just ugly. I'm not a designer, so that was really demotivating...


👤 aabbcc1241
The Idea Machine

A live crowd-sourced collection of ideas for new apps & business ideas that have been requested by the internet. Sorted by Hot, Top and New. With upvotes and downvotes. To post your own idea use the hashtag #ideaMachine or click the "submit a new idea" button below.

http://www.ideamachine.io/

(I'm not the owner, just share it here)



👤 mmmuhd
Well I am in the camp of "ideas and even execution are worthless" now, what really matters is strong focus, I have executed 3 ideas from November of last year but after building them to what I feel like is a finished mvp, I always feel strong irresistible desire to build something else that I think is the coolest thing only to throw it after finishing, this is really my problem now.

👤 melicerte
My humble suggestion: write a web page with all your ideas, publish the page on HN and let people comments. It has already been done in the past.

👤 aanonymouse
https://www.fiveideasaday.com/

Could run into same issues as others, but right now looks to be focused on the light-hearted, fun aspect of idea generation and potential for sparking creativity. Unsure about the intent to start a sub community that is paid, don’t think this will be the long term winning approach.


👤 anant90
I've been trying to give away ideas via a simple Twitter thread that I hope to keep updating over time:

https://twitter.com/anant90/status/1171867648285540352

Incidentally, "a platform for sharing well-researched ideas" is #11 on this list :)


👤 AlchemistCamp

👤 pseudozach
Ironically this is on my to-do list. A site where devs can put out ideas, users can lock money on them and the person that develops it and brings it live can claim the bounty. I have so many ideas but I'm tired of putting out things that only a few people use as are lots of others on here.

👤 BlameKaneda
When I'm bored, I occasionally find myself here: https://unawaz.github.io/stochastic-hill-climbing/tasks/

Unfortunately there isn't a way to submit anything.


👤 Dumblydorr
What if HN built out a post type for idea sharing? Maybe a monthly post your coding project ideas thread?

👤 Can_Not
I found a similar platform to what to are describing once in the past, the main issue was that 100% of the ideas I found were wildly outside the scope of apps I was interested in making. Maybe if I could categorically exclude IOT, iPhone ideas, blockchain, full video games, etc..

👤 kerridge0
used to be one called the global ideas bank but went away presumably due to lack of funding. Founded by Nicholas Albery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Albery

👤 kerkeslager
I'm in the camp of "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything", in a literal sense. I'd rather have an executed bad idea than a good idea.

An obvious conclusion of this is that even though I think your "platform for sharing ideas" idea is bad, just execute it. :)


👤 philshem
Slight variation:

http://highdeas.com/


👤 rtx
Kickstarter look at products which have good response and see if you can execute faster and better.

👤 jelliclesfarm
You said that you are of the camp that ‘ideas of worthless’. That strikes me as predatory.

People who are technical and don’t have creativity to come up with new ideas should be employees, not creators. People who can come up with ideas but cannot manage need managers. All those who cannot come up with any of the above should be investors.

It is a cunning trick that I observed in the past decade in the start up scene. Instinctively I don’t trust anyone who says that ‘ideas are worthless’.

Perhaps this is the reason why many start ups fail. There is no creator or domain expert. I see that in Agtech. The best Agtech companies are those who have some connection to farming. A handful of them are technical.

Even those who are technical do not work in the field. It is the uneducated non technical Joses and Marias who are immigrant labour that do all the work that needs to be automated.

They are not technical. They barely know English. But by not including those who Agtech is seeking to replace with tech and robots at the table, they set themselves up for failure.

I have a small farm and a little technical, but Ag robotics is multiple platforms. As a small farm owner who also has to keep the farm financially solvent and someone who also does manual work that needs to be replaced, I can spot right away how many of the Agtech companies will fail. And most of them will fail. The ones that will make it are those who have someone in the team with in-field experience.

It’s this non technical team that will come up with the best ideas because they know where they need help desperately. This is also why Europe will likely succeed first in Agtech than America. Because they have technical expertise as well as the idea team.

I hope those who dismiss ideas will reconsider. An idea is like a possibility. There are many ways it can fail and a narrower path to succeed. Only the person who came up with the idea will know the limitations and by excluding them, the chances of failures are multiplied.

As an aside: YC is also guilty of this dismissive attitude. This is also why most start ups will fail. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing but failed start ups are graveyard of what may have succeeded. It’s an enormous waste of space and resources. The only upside is redistribution of capital and creation of jobs. Hence even failed start ups and bad ideas that get funding is not necessary a bad thing. If we don’t have jobs, I guess there won’t be a way to employ the hordes of STEM educated young people pouring out into the world as they come of age.


👤 zekehernandez
I love thinking of video game ideas, so much so that I made a website to publish the ideas in a rather fleshed out manner: http://creativeowlet.com/

👤 gitgud
This mailing list share ideas with an execution plan too. Fun to read in the inbox every now and then.

https://www.startupsfromthebottom.com/


👤 dwrodri
I keep an idea list on my personal website. I like the thought of my ideas being valuable enough to hide in plain sight, but interesting enough to be worth saving and sharing with my fellow nerd friends on occasion.

👤 Iv
Ideas are not just cheap, the huge majority of them are actually bad. Most ideas are actually not worth the time to consider them.

If you want a repository for good ideas, I think first you need to find a way to filter the bad ones.


👤 PookMook
I'm building https://makeithappen.dev just for that, it's in the MVP stage and pretty slow, but it will get there eventually!

👤 perk
Not a platform but relevant:

Products I'd Pay For, 2020 Edition https://dmonn.ch/smb-2020/

I'm not the author.



👤 akman
Y Combinator Requests for Startups: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

👤 BigBalli
I believe most of us techies have our own personal list saved somewhere. Your best bet is probably Reddit if you do not have a large following on social media.

👤 hananbo
I've built willpayfor.com not long ago. You're all welcome to share ideas and mention how valuable in terms of money a product or service might be.

👤 mcxlog
The journal of brief ideas, https://beta.briefideas.org/about

👤 d99kris

👤 fullstackchris
a few from product hunt product i occasionally look at that are fun:

http://problemoftheday.co/

https://ideasareworthless.io/


👤 thedevindevops
Quality varies wildly but if you're not adverse to reddit, check out /r/AppIdeas

👤 ogou
Yes, it's called "grandparents" and can also be found on "in-laws."

👤 meerita
You can do that on Twitter.

👤 Razengan
> I'm in the camp of ”Ideas are worthless”

Then why ask people here for ideas for a platform?

You are here because you couldn’t think of all possibilities yourself.

Ideas are the first step, without which everything that comes after, wouldn’t.


👤 xena
Twitter

👤 acvny
Producthunt

👤 carapace
WWW

Start a web-ring?


👤 oth001
Good idea!

👤 egypturnash
Twiter

👤 justboxing
24K Members: https://www.reddit.com/r/Startup_Ideas/

569K Members: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyIdeas/

The 1st one is pretty active in that you get feedback also from the community.


👤 gowld
"Ideas are worthless, execution is everything" means that with high probability everyone who can execute already knows your ideas.

If your idea isn't good enough for you to work on it, why would it inspire anyone else?