Kat Garsi
UX Consultant

Notebook

Why 100 App Ideas

My favorite weapon for coming up with great ideas comes from a James Altucher's method. 

Every single day, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen, and write down 10 ideas for any topic. It could be anything: coffee drink flavors, ways to eat healthier, blog post ideas, ways to grow your business, ways to grow someone else's business...

The fun part is, the ideas can be horrible. In fact, most of them should be. The habit is just in taking the time for the brain to think creatively.

100 App Ideas

When the UX class I'm in had an assignment to pick a topic for our final project - a web app, I started by making a few of these lists.

I started with ideas for 10 different life categories because I didn't want to focus on some random app idea. Our focus in class is to think of problems and follow a thread to the solution instead of bring solutions we think are correct to a situation.

Then I reviewed my categories and tried to come with one or two ideas for each category.

However, to get to 100 ideas, you can take each category and come up with 10 ideas for that specific category. With this method, you could come up with 100 different app ideas very quickly. Even if 90 of them are horrible, you could have 10 good ones to experiment with.

Why 100 Problems is Better!

If you want to be extra interesting, instead of creating a list of 10 ideas for each category, create 10 problem statements for each category.

Like... "The problem with budgeting I suspect is.... it's boring."

Then you'll have 100 problems that are just waiting for you to solve!

Here's what I came up with for the categories:

  1. Home

  2. Budgeting

  3. Travel

  4. Crafting & Making

  5. Dancing

  6. Meditation

  7. Owning plants

  8. Retirement

  9. Getting married

  10. Not getting married

100-ideas-notebook.jpg

My actual notebook

 

Here's my round two of ideas for the some of categories above. 

  1. Expense tracking for couples on vacation

  2. Project tracker for crafters

  3. Improv dance drills tool

  4. Organizing your home checklist with badges and rewards

  5. Stash organizer for crafters

  6. VR design your meditation space with guided meditations / sounds

  7. Plant watering and plant growth tracker

  8. Idea capturing tool with rankings and categories

  9. Capturing stories from older generation in a timeline of photos, news from the era, etc

  10. Getting motivation to complete the last 10% of a project

Definitely some bad ideas in there = SUCCESS! 

Now on to the hard part - picking just one...

ideasKat Garsi