15th
On ideas
I had an interesting conversation with a friend about the nature of the software and web app brainstorming process. Where do we get our ideas from, why do we think they’re good, and how, as independent developers, can we come up with more viable and profitable ideas?
Fixing My Own Problems
Reflecting on the services and software I’ve independently worked on through completion, this can be said for all of them - I originally created them to meet one or more of my own needs. Of those that were “successful” - which in my hobbyist sense of the word means, people other than myself used them - one thing was clear: these people were a lot like me.
The Developer Brain
As developers, we’re used to thinking about how to solve problems using the right tools. When these tools don’t exist, we’re used to thinking about how to make them ourselves. The easiest ideas to come up with for us are ideas that somehow streamline what we know best: development. Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of developers out there. And because they’re already really good at making their own tools to solve problems, whatever you come up with to help them do something and try to sell to them will have to be non-trivial. The more complex or difficult to implement your idea is, the higher you raise the bar of implementation, theoretically increasing the size of your market. But for independent developers, even this isn’t really probably enough. Because if your idea is really awesome, but really hard to implement, an open source version of it will probably appear. Then, you have to worry about all kinds of other ways to differentiate - support, customization, selling some kind of service. And that all sounds very not fun.
Escape the Developer Brain (If You Want To)
Developers are notorious for not understanding marketing, business, and usability. Large corporations fund research divisions internally, and then see what happens, removing the developer from the business side of the product. When somebody high enough on the totem pole deems some crazy idea that emerges from R&D monetarily viable, the company funds efforts to refine and market. Actually working at places like these back in the day, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, had always seemed like the ultimate job for me; just hacking on awesome shit all day, and getting paid? Wow.
You don’t have to work at Bell Labs, have a CS degree from somewhere fancy, or survive a 10 round interview just kind to run your own R&D. Hack on stuff, play with stuff, have ideas, implement them, and see how it goes. Your controlling interest is your day job. It’s what we all do anyway, and doing it adds a lot of value to my life.
But, as an independent, without your own market research department to help you tune and focus your ideas, it’s on you to come up with interesting things to implement that benefit someone, somehow. And if you’re to come up with something that benefits people beyond just people like you, you really have to expand your horizons and begin to consider problems so trivial and so mundane that under normal circumstances you wouldn’t even try to solve them for lack of interest. These are the ideas that people who aren’t like you at all have every day. And these, I think, are the ideas that you can sell.
The Developer-Hobbyist vs. The Developer-Entrepreneur
A lot of times I program things because I think they’re cool to program. These things may or may not be useful. They may or may not have already been done. But whatever, I have fun making them. I avoid programming boring things in my own time. Because my own time is the only time I develop anything outside of what I do for work, and because a lot of ideas for actually making money are actually kind of boring to implement (and probably a crapshoot anyway), I don’t work on them at all. This makes me a developer hobbyist and not a businessman.
I think there are certain ideas that are both interesting for the developer brain and lucrative for the entrepreneur, though. These are ideas that get funded and make news, and they are rare. And I think if I play around enough, and learn enough, one day I might stumble on one of these.
I’m always suprised at what people will pay for. Which is why I’ve always been terrible at marketing and monetising my ideas.
