joshuago’s product_ideas Bookmarks

If you’re planning a web app, it’s always worth reminding yourself what the base need is that you’re satisfying, and how much value it is likely to have with the user: a successful business/service should neither over nor under-value itself.

By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once great excitement about the potential for LDAP based directory servers to become more than just authentication servers and morph into general purpose datastores. LDAP directories promised a single, scalable, high performance data store that could be queried for common information across multiple applications.

The most important thing is to have good examples on which to hang the abstract ideas. If the example takes too long to explain or is too much tied to a particular application, I might lose the interest or attention of too many readers. Thus I spend a great deal of time trying to find examples that are simultaneously easy to grasp and quite instructive.

Money creates a sort of friction. Sometimes, you want friction. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests.

If you're a regular at a restaurant and the staff has one off-night, you can be patient because you know the food is worth the wait. If it's your first visit... not so much. And, importantly, you probably won't return. Initial impressions count, in software and in everything else.

When you make something you make something else. Find it, package it, and sell it. There’s money to be made everywhere.

Imagine the economic value of knowing, with mathematical certainty, exactly what the law is. If organizations could calculate legal risk as efficiently as they can now calculate financial risk (recession notwithstanding), millions of dollars in legal fees could be rerouted toward economic growth.

Basic functionality, like calling people, email, and certainly document editing still feel inelegant and clunky due to the onscreen keyboard, and the lack of multitasking makes moving around through those typically important tasks difficult to say the least. At the end of the day, it's nice to stick the "we love business users" line into your PR, but it's quite another thing to make it real.