[cdiamand]

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!

[stanmancan]

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.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I have more ideas than I have time to implement, so I focus on the ones that are most interesting/doable/potentially profitable.

The bounty idea is a good one, but again, I think it will rapidly become a race to the bottom on price. As soon as the bounty gets to the point where someone in e.g., Eastern Europe thinks it's good money, they'll bid on it even though a dev in SF thinks it's pocket change. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that in a lot of cases it will happen as soon as the bounty hits $100.

[bgdam]

Wouldn't this be a win-win-win situation for everyone? The guy with the idea gets it built, the guy in eastern Europe, earns some decent money, and the guy in San Francisco didn't waste his time for chump change.

[fhbdukfrh]

Don't we already know the magic number is $5?

[sailfast]

Wouldn't that be an excellent outcome for the person with the idea?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Absolutely. But OP is focused on getting good projects for the developers and usually the devs saying they can't find customers are in locations where the COL is too high for this to be profitable for them.

One to get around this problem is to focus on only doing the same kind of work and getting better at doing it quickly so it becomes profitable to you, or doing it in a more Productized Service fashion. But that's a solution to a different problem, not what the OP was asking about.

[fullstackchris]

This is huge, and what plagues a lot of software engineers / product developers to this day. You may find a super cheap software company somewhere out in the world - but if the project is anything more than something like a webpage with jquery (as most modern projects involving software are) you end up spending more on fixing, re-fixing, and billing than you would have if you had just paid one time for the more expensive company / service / consultant that is well vouched for or acreddited

[sailfast]

Sure, this is absolutely true. That said, if you can test a prototype for $100 and validate the business idea it's easier to figure out how to pay for (and/or that it is worth spending the time building yourself) the better, built from scratch version. You'll probably also get some good feedback.

I think this is the disconnect for me when reading this question. If the question is "where do I find good ideas for my personal tinkering projects" that's one thing, but if you're looking for profitable startup ideas it's not about the engineering - it's about testing quickly and validating the business so the development piece can be much less important (unless of course the business is software tooling)

[Jarwain]

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

[cdiamand]

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]

Inkit? Pretty cool product https://www.inkit.com/

[rtb]

A quick search for "send letter online" shows there are at least 2 or 3 companies that offer this currently.

[halfeatenpie]

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]

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]

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.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

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 :-(

[jcadam]

> 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]

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!

[AQuantized]

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]

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]

Same, I am curious too so I just decided to (shameful plug) create an email and reply to any requests for now at [e-mail] for ideas with some details regarding your background, field of interest, and motive.

[hooande]

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

[wpietri]

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]

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.

[scarejunba]

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.

[pascalxus]

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"

[kevan]

>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 [1] https://www.demandrush.com/

[cdiamand]

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

[thesehands]

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]

Thank you :)

[otras]

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]

Thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed it :)

[samcheng]

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]

Thanks Sam, that means a lot :) Onwards!

[Giorgi]

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

[cdiamand]

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

[RosanaAnaDana]

'ideas'

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

[steakin]

" "I haven't read it, but I bet it's great."

Jonathan R., CFA and Investor "

Hahaha, you're great.

[cdiamand]

Hahaha I was wondering if anybody would read that!

[xeroaura]

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

[cdiamand]

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.

[codegeek]

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]

> We track the most mentioned stocks on 4chan and WallStreetBets

Just make sure you choose a Personal Risk Tolerance That Works For You.

[asdf333]

love the name. good luck

[cdiamand]

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!