The best way to come up with a good idea, is to come up with 10 bad ones

There’s a train of thought that in order to come up with 1 good article idea or find 1 successful business to invest in you need to look at 10,20,100 + and only then decide on the best one to put your effort into.

The logic being that going through all these different ideas you start to notice patterns and get a feel of what’s on offer. I set myself the goal this morning of coming up with 10+ business ideas that someone could create and run by themselves without needing millions in start-up funds. Not because I intend to try and follow any of them through but just as practise being creative.

admittedly some of these ideas are going to be terrible and some may already exist (I didn’t check to see if any companies are already doing these ideas. as that’s not the point of the exercise.)

1 -3D pet printing – I’ve seen the booths popping up in super markets and photo shops where you walk in, cameras take a photo of you from all angles and then a computer program turns you into a CAD model which then gets sent to a 3d printer. I’m yet to see one tailored for pets. Plenty of pet owners would want a figurine of their little furry friends.

2 -Interactive Royal family tree by country – I once went looking into the UK royal family history to see how far back I could go and found there isn’t any centralised place with all the info in neat and tidy boxes. I had to go on a click-fest via Wikipedia and Google. If someone created a family tree of the entire royal family for England (or other countries) it would be useful for people interested in history but not motivated enough to do the digging themselves. As long as the presentation was top notch it could be a saleable product.

3 – Ariel time lapse footage – Fly a drone up to a certain point each day for a year or float a balloon to take 365 photographs which get merged into a video to show the seasons changing in your local neighbourhood or point of interest.

4 – Robot compliment service – A subscription service where you get a daily text/call/e-mail with a random compliment to cheer you up.

5 – Small asset tracker – A place to log all the small items you have in your house such as CDs, DVDs, branded clothes, gadgets. The database then keeps a track of what these items are selling for on Ebay/Amazon and shows you the info. This will help people keep track the effect of depreciation on their items, act as a reference point for which unused items can be sold for the most cash if needed and could come in handy for insurance purposes in the event of your house being burgled or burning down.

6 – Cute Bunny magazine – I’ve seen magazines with nothing but cute kitten or puppy pictures, why not one for rabbits?

7 – Bluetooth / wifi signal strength phone finder – I’m not sure if this is technically possible but if you lose your phone and its on silent you cant ring it to try to find it. You could in theory get a bluetooth or wifi device that connects to your phone and also shows you the strength of the connection. The closer you get to your phone the stronger the signal. Admittedly this “gadget” wouldn’t work if your phone was turned off. Think of it as a phone finding version of the hotter/colder game.

8 – Semi-sponsor/adopt a child in a 3rd world country – Sometimes donating to a charity doesn’t seem like enough, and for most people adopting a child is way too far. So how about something in the middle? a website that lets you send money for school supplies, clothes, food for a specific child/family in a 3rd world country. (I came up with 100000 reasons against this idea in about 5 minutes but I wont go into them as its not the reason for this blog post)

9 -cleaning rota tracker – There are many things in a typical household which don’t require cleaning every week but do require maintenance every few weeks / months e.g. cleaning out a sink u-bend or defrosting the fridge. It would be useful to have an app that kept track of these non-weekly tasks so every time you do your weekly clean you can see what extra chores you need to get sorted during that specific week.

10 – writers block helper – A website where writers submit a small paragraph or a few sentences of a work in progress that they would like others to proof read and give constructive feedback on. In return they can proof read other peoples excerpts. I’ve a feeling that this will get peoples creative minds working slowly which in turn might cure their writers block.

11 – Designer shoe laces – Submit your custom designs to be turned into shoe laces. Either your name or a logo you like (This one already exists as I Googled it after coming up with it, however its more for businesses as the orders must have minimums of 100 laces. Someone might have luck selling these individually for $5-$10)

 

I’m fairly confident that out of these 11 bad ideas at least 1 would be useful to everyone reading this post. Has anyone done anything similar on their Blogs?

 

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