Things I Didn't Build Yet

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Here are some ideas I've been thinking about for a long time. In some cases I've started a prototype, in others it's just some thoughts. There are too many ideas for me to build in a lifetime, so I'm just posting them here, even though I might work on some in the future. Ideas are cheap, execution is hard. If you're interested in starting a business based on this, please let me know as a courtesy :) I just want these solutions to exist so I can use them.

Discuss these ideas on hacker news

CloudSound

Software businesses are silent. Let's change that. CloudSound makes your business events audible from a Chrome tab. You stream your logs to cloudsound and you can hear what's happening with a custom soundboard. A payment made? Ka-ching! An error? <alarm>. New customer? Get in tha choppah! At some point if there's a lot of traffic it can be made into acoustically pleasing ambient sounds. The way game music changes if there's an end-boss. The idea is that we are already overstimulated visually with dashboards etc, but there is some room for not-too-annoying ambient audio.

GitShuffle

GeoGuessr for code. You are dropped in spotlight mode into a codebase, and you have to guess which repo, which file and which line. Enterprise edition: do this on-prem with your own codebases, so you can learn them in a playful way.

RichMeet

Online meetings are stuck in 1950. We should have:
  • agenda with timekeeping built-in
  • explicit decision points with voting mechanisms, notes are automatically taken
  • see who's in the meeting, what their background is and what their role is during the meeting
  • the ability to add someone by phone into the meeting (e.g. the meeting dials you, not the other way round)
  • automatic feedback on your audio and video quality, you are often annoying the hell out of other people without realizing
  • collect feedback about the quality of the meeting (content wise) from everyone, so the organizer can improve
  • bit creepy: engagement analysis based on contribution, gaze and facial expressions

DocuSnooze

Documents accumulate on drives within companies. Storage is too cheap but attention is not. What if we wipe all documents that have not been accessed or modified in the last year(?). Each document has a clear owner, who gets an email "these documents will be deleted next week". You can snooze docs from within the email, or permanently prevent folders from being trimmed.

Stacky Bird

A program that teaches kids simple programming by solving puzzles and having a bird manipulate a stack. Made a prototype at https://game.stackybird.com

TechMap

Have all software companies in a country and puts their office locations on a map. Filter on product vs. services companies, funding type, org size. Find the company you want to be with, that's close to you, not based on who can post their job openings the best, but on what companies are out there. Sometimes a company is perfect for you but not hiring right now, would be nice if you knew about it! Needs to be crowd-sourced with all the difficulties of that... However, if it works, it makes the software market much more transparent. Power to the people!

Social Gravity

A tool to explore social networks in a 2d map, people cluster towards who they know. You can learn so much about people's and group's interests, it's creepy.

KnowledgeGraph

A personal information manager with concepts, people, organizations. The data can be explored via a map / tech-tree interface. Your memory might suck, but we can augment that. E.g. you can instantly pull up the names of your friends' kids, get reminders on their birthdays, etc. Also useful for documenting "mandatory" knowledge within a team. Can be gameified a bit so you can level-up your knowledge within an area. Gives you clear input for your "personal development plan".

CompetitorWatch

Automatically keep track of your competitors using web-scraping and other insights. Super useful for Product Managers and CEOs.

NextGenCode

Software systems are full of vestigial parts. We are still just slowly abstracting how chips actually work, while we should be focusing on what developers need to get done. A modern web-stack needs: server language, databases/ORM, client-side app, styling. Then there's monitoring, alerting, logging, backup, the IDE, debugging, requirements, documentation, compliance, testing, It's a lot. Most of these components are bolted on to programming languages with duct-tape. We need something simpler and better, built from the ground up. Software is unique in that it's so flexible, I know there's a better solution out there.

ClassicMovies

There are too many new movies in cinemas. There's about 100 years of film history, but you can only view 2 or 3 years in a theater. It would be great if there were more, let's build a platform that shows you what's out there and stimulates new ways of showing old films.

PersonalDashboard

Keep track of whatever you want. Your habits, exercise, weight, work, learning. Select pre-sets (I want to be the perfect suburban father with a dad-bod / I want to be an entrepreneur / I want to become a tenured professor) and the platform gives you a roadmap and KPIs on the behaviors you need to stick to to get there.

CloudLab

Mass-spectrometer lab software often runs on workstations in the lab itself. It would be great if there was a manufacturer-independent software solution to perform the analysis in the cloud. It decouples the location of the labs with the technicians of the analysts with the software.

VisualRegression

Include a visual output of your software in your CI run, with differences with the previous versions highlighted. On all supported device screens etc. It would be even better if there was a real-time feedback option for this. Think webpack-debug server but you see the rendered app on 20 screens at the same time. An AI monitors for abnormalities (e.g. text overflowing buttons) and warns you instantly.

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