What do people want? How do I find out what people want? | Hacker News Reader

What do people want? How do I find out what people want?

4 pointsdawie11 comments

I just started a blog called "Bad Idea a Day" (it's at that .com, but I'm not trying to advertise it). I force myself to think of a product, story, lifehack, or any idea each morning.

It's just for fun and mental practice. But so far I like my ideas, and I'm already talking to a designer about possibly turning one idea into a product.

You could do the same with a blog, Tumblr, or Twitter account named "What people want." Every morning, think of something people want. Do it again at lunch. Do it again at dinner.

Make the account private if you want, but I recommend putting ideas up in public. You're more likely to find a partner and willing free advice than to get your idea stolen.

I don't think forcing yourself to come up with an idea is particularly the best way of going about it. Some of my best ideas have spawned out of pure stream of consciousness. I think by doing what you do, you turn coming up with ideas into a task that you limit yourself to doing only several times a day. Morning or lunch shouldn't just be 'idea time.' Your whole life, your experiences, your interactions should be 'idea time.'

But if you're coming up with zero ideas, adding three a day is an improvement. What you call "forcing yourself," I call every writers' room and recording artist contract.

I didn't write much good material until Valleywag made me write twelve blog posts a day. Only three or four were really good -- but that's three or four more good posts a day than I was turning out before.

I like to ask myself what I can develop that will make someone's job obsolete. I haven't implemented any of these ideas yet, but it seems like a good way to find something that should be made. If a robot or computer can do it, why shouldn't it?

Paul says: "Make something people want." I have read all his essays and especially like the one about million $ ideas.

I want to make something people want, but I don't know what they want. How do I find out what people want?

What do you want? and Paul anything you think people want?

Start with what you want. That's what Woz did, and Larry and Sergey. If you can't find an idea there, look for things friends and family want.

Thanks for the advice Paul.

Right, make something YOU want.

Now, in every little thing I do in life, I experience really trivial daily struggles. These struggles are so common that to any ordinary person, they are hardly noticed. What I tend to do now is after everything I do, I just think about what I just did, and if I had any problems, or if there were aspects of what I did that could be made easier. This may not be the ideal approach, but I believe that soon I will land, or perhaps that I have already landed, on an issue that is not only exclusive to myself, but to many many others. This may not be an ideal method, but it keeps me on my toes and has made me extremely analytical of everyday situations.

Making something that YOU want, in my opinion, carries a connection with your idea and a drive to pursue it far greater than one made to please others. However selfish this may sound, but every time I brainstorm about new ideas, I come first, and that's my litmus test of approval. If it's something I don't want, won't help me, or won't find interesting in any way, however interesting or helpful it may be to others, I scrap the idea.

Brainstorm!

Thanks kyro. You posted some good advice. I often try and be analytical too and I try and look at what problems companies are solving. For example, Facebook helps people stay in touch.

Be analytical of what you do daily.

And if anything, you should be looking at problems that companies are NOT solving.

A good rule of thumb is to look for things that save time and/or energy. The more saving, the more valuable your idea is to the users.

The idea value, in the eye of the user, is the saving multiplied by its occurence. Big savings are eye catching and most probably covered by zillion startups. Small savings are more frequent but also often less obvious and eye catching. This is the heuristic I would use to find where to start searching for an idea.

google search algorithm is in fact saving search time. This is where the value comes from. The advertisement is a smart way to leverage the value without restraining access.

To detect these tasks with potential savings you have to scrutinize what you, or people around you, do on a daily basis.

One example I am currently thinking of is typing on these cumbersome keyboards. There is something to do there, especially if pressure sensitive screens become available.

Look at what it takes to type a message with a mobile phone. Painfull. Look at how big a keyboard has to be. Look at the blackberry success and the high value of an interface that would not require these littles keys wasting space you could use for viewing things (cf. iPhone).

You won't wake up one morning shouting "eureka". This is something to experiment and explore as the people at Xerox did with smalltalk and their brilliant mouse and graphic interface.

The keybord thing is is just to give an example of something people do every day without thinking of it and imagine that there might be a better way. This is where you can find gems and gold mines.

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