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- May 2, 2011
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Didn't know how to name the topic so here it go 
I' starting this thread since I'm pretty alone in my business ventures and really can't get any real feedback from friends. I'm a Android developer for 2 years (never programmed nothing before, my frist programming language) and since my initial idea of having apps bringing tons of cash didn't quite worked out (as for now 300k downloads and appx. $5k dollars last year which is not bad, but still it's under poverty line) I'm looking for problems in real world to solve with building apps.
About me: I have no job now (purposely) because I have enough spare cash to live like that at least 6 months (in fact, even a year). I want to use this budget to buy time so I can build a business from nothing, or should I say - without investing any bigger amounts of money (unless it's a really good and checked deal). If anything would go wrong - I can get a job as a mobile developer and get my financial wounds healed, so I'm not stressed.
Three weeks ago I came across with an idea of reinventing local commerce (vide: OLX, gumtree). I found that it lacked specific function - range filter, so if I would like to see only items that are nearby then only those would be showed. If I have a bike or car, I could change range to, let's say, couple of miles.
From words to actions - I get together with two programmers to hire one of them (pay was in future shares if succeeded) and started making app. After two weeks it went live (here's the fanpage if anyone want to see it, hope it's not forbidden - although, it's right now only for polish market so don't be surprised that You can't reach it) with all basic functionalities like range filter, photo capturing (with cropping) and so on. After a week (it's today) I don't see much of a traction. Moreover, I think that with this saturated market I should have more money on marketing or at least get a nice viral video like this:
So I done pivot today - I went to the galleries that sells their art to check if they would be interested in this as a discovery tool. The make pictures of their items and potential buyers that are nearby can discover them intentionally. Well, in my city (700k population), there are only couple of them so You could imagine that it would not make too much money, but I went to talk with them nevertheless. From 6 of them maybe 2 were interested - like really interested with real curiosity in their eyes.
And then another idea came to my mind - "I'm hungry". Yap, trivial, but I went through a signboard of a restaurant with a text like this "Chef recommends" and I though "It would be nice to gather all the chef recommendations of the day in one place so I wouldn't have to run around all of them everyday" and since I could do this with range filter I think that it may just be a better idea to execute.
Idea is pretty simple: I get in touch with restaurants if they would be interested in delivering on dish that their chef recommends and promote this app in the strict center. Of course, if I would see a bigger traction I think it would be reasonable to charge for like $5/month from restaurants.
It would be nice to hear from You guys what do You think and if You have any suggestions - feel free to post it I will try to keep this topic up to date!
I' starting this thread since I'm pretty alone in my business ventures and really can't get any real feedback from friends. I'm a Android developer for 2 years (never programmed nothing before, my frist programming language) and since my initial idea of having apps bringing tons of cash didn't quite worked out (as for now 300k downloads and appx. $5k dollars last year which is not bad, but still it's under poverty line) I'm looking for problems in real world to solve with building apps.
About me: I have no job now (purposely) because I have enough spare cash to live like that at least 6 months (in fact, even a year). I want to use this budget to buy time so I can build a business from nothing, or should I say - without investing any bigger amounts of money (unless it's a really good and checked deal). If anything would go wrong - I can get a job as a mobile developer and get my financial wounds healed, so I'm not stressed.
Three weeks ago I came across with an idea of reinventing local commerce (vide: OLX, gumtree). I found that it lacked specific function - range filter, so if I would like to see only items that are nearby then only those would be showed. If I have a bike or car, I could change range to, let's say, couple of miles.
From words to actions - I get together with two programmers to hire one of them (pay was in future shares if succeeded) and started making app. After two weeks it went live (here's the fanpage if anyone want to see it, hope it's not forbidden - although, it's right now only for polish market so don't be surprised that You can't reach it) with all basic functionalities like range filter, photo capturing (with cropping) and so on. After a week (it's today) I don't see much of a traction. Moreover, I think that with this saturated market I should have more money on marketing or at least get a nice viral video like this:
So I done pivot today - I went to the galleries that sells their art to check if they would be interested in this as a discovery tool. The make pictures of their items and potential buyers that are nearby can discover them intentionally. Well, in my city (700k population), there are only couple of them so You could imagine that it would not make too much money, but I went to talk with them nevertheless. From 6 of them maybe 2 were interested - like really interested with real curiosity in their eyes.
And then another idea came to my mind - "I'm hungry". Yap, trivial, but I went through a signboard of a restaurant with a text like this "Chef recommends" and I though "It would be nice to gather all the chef recommendations of the day in one place so I wouldn't have to run around all of them everyday" and since I could do this with range filter I think that it may just be a better idea to execute.
Idea is pretty simple: I get in touch with restaurants if they would be interested in delivering on dish that their chef recommends and promote this app in the strict center. Of course, if I would see a bigger traction I think it would be reasonable to charge for like $5/month from restaurants.
It would be nice to hear from You guys what do You think and if You have any suggestions - feel free to post it
I will try to keep this topic up to date!
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