I have been listening to a lot of Indie Hackers podcasts lately, and it is making me want to work on another side project. I had to shut down my last project (submittalextractor.com) due to a patent issue, which really pissed me off and me turned me off of doing side projects for a while.

This is a list of ideas I have been kicking around, and the point here is that these ideas should be small and contained so that they can be done in a single week.

The list of ideas

1. Bando Map - find large abandoned buildings nearby. Target audience: fpv pilots, urban explorers, rooftoppers. (This exists but it is more general and for photographers).
2. LunchExplor - what cool things can you do nearby in under 1 hour? Calculate based on walking or biking distance.
3. Is it bullshit? - A site or chrome plugin that scans the text of an article for logical fallacies somehow and give a score of how bad it is.
4. Email address rater - rate email for originality. Insult all entrants.
5. Find cliffs. Somehow analyze topographic maps to figure out where you would suspect cliffs to be. Target audience: rock climbers.
6. On date ‘X’ where are the relatively cheap places to fly?
7. On date ‘x’ where are the extremely cheap places to AirBnB (something like an offseason finder)
8. Mobile App: how many days until summer. For people who live in cold regions. Something snarky along the lines of “Authentic Weather”.
9. Optimal city finder based on where you live now. I.e. is Boulder Colorado objectively better than Minneapolis Minnesota based on criteria you provide? US only. Like nomadlist but more about living there, will have stuff like tax rate percentage calc and housing price indexes and job posting or unemployment stats.
10. C-Level Connect - create a map of all the C-level execs of every company in the S&P 500 (this is available a lot of places), and also show their contact info.
11. FPV check-in app, or something like Strava for FPV
12. Game: goldminer - a game where gold randomly spawns and you have to go pick it up. Not sure if it will be global or not. Not sure if it will show everyone on the map together or not.
13. A site that helps you build a longline (a slackline over 150 feet) and get all of the gear you need
14. A github project analyzer that can tell you if a project is dead or not, also it rates how well maintained it is historically in terms of how fast issues are closed, ect.
15. A site that identifies interesting options pricing and shows lucrative bets based on projected scenarios. E.g. “wow long volatility is super cheap now”. Or “wow LEAPs on Shopify are relatively cheap now on a recent historical basis”.
16. JavaScript framework popularity contest. The UI would have to be best part here, should be a little snarky.
17. A site shows how expensive various hobbies are yearly. Some hobbies are cheap, some are expensive, others can be made to be expensive if you go to a pricey gym, ect.
18. subscription site for props (propellers for FPV quadcopters), they are delivered monthly, weekly, whatever.
19. A learning system to teach tech recruiters because many of them seem (to be polite), uh, confused about basic aspects what they are recruiting for.
20. An app that helps you keep your network alive, it randomly selects contacts from your contact list and suggests email topics to email them about.
21. An app that looks at your LinkedIn and suggests people to talk to based on career goals. E.g. I want to learn machine learning - did I ever work with somebody in the past who does that now?
22. A system to generate mailing lists or communities out of BlackBoard class rosters? I used to teach a programming class at a community college and I would always send links to the students about local events, they asked me to continue it somehow. Maybe a specific curation of events for junior devs?
23. A site that curates content about how to break into other fields / jobs. Easy to know the path to become a doctor, hard to know the path to become a neurosurgeon? OK maybe this is a little bit better for things like software, cyber security and finance where it seems kind of difficult to discover how to get into a given field and actually get hired.
24. A site that compares two careers in terms of money / hours / schooling / and generates a graph showing progression between the two
25. A site where you can pick a person with a job title on Linkedin e.g. “Chief Technology Officer” and it analyzes their job history + people like that person to see the path they took to get that high ranking job.
26. A simple research tool specifically meant for shorting stocks and finding companies with high bankruptcy risk. It could be made to be pretty funny, something like “Will they end up like Enron?” kind of thing.
27. Odor Map - map out the smelliest places in the US by odor complaint. There must be a dataset for this? Maybe EPA?
28. A beautiful drug halflife calculator with nice graphing output from the current time. All the ones out there look ugly. Also there is one in the app store with only 100 downloads so probably a bad idea.
29. A subscription service that sends random stickers every month. It could be done very cheaply, like a $3 a month service and send a few stickers. People love stickers.
30. Treadwall game where you are climbing up a giant treadwall and things keep breaking off, go as long as possible.
31. Dating app that shows interests and life goals you have to swipe on before you swipe to pictures.
32. Recruiter rating system for tech recruiters. Why should I ever work with a shitty recruiter? I want to make as much money as possible and have the process go as smooth as possible. Might be hard because I bet recruiter turnover is higher than a McDonalds in a bad neighborhood.
33. A website that lists ways to potentially passively generate $1000 per month along with the various risks that entails. Things like savings account -> investing in bonds -> invest in blue chips -> invest in MLPs -> invest in reits -> invest in … -> finally to do doing some kind work that entails little time. okay I actually built this recently
34. “So You Lost Some Money” site - you type in how much money you lost and it shows you how many cheeseburgers, ubers, bicycles, Honda Civics you could have bought, ect.
35. A system to generate ideas for alpha factors. Alpha factors are things that may indicate outperformance in the market. E.g. woman CEO, or High revenue / employee ratio. Generate novel ideas to backtest against. E.g. do companies located blank do worse on average? “blank” gets filled in with “hurricane zones” or something.

Ideas for products (physical)

1. Recycled props for FPV
2. Monthly prank - subscription service that mails you the tools to do an office prank every month. It should be very cheap and easy, and not dangerous. (this exists already somewhat)
3. Composable shoes for traveling from snowy areas to hot areas. You can remove parts of your boots to make water shoes. You can remove even more to make sandals.
4. TredRope - like a treadmill or a treadwall but a big rope you climb on a loop so you can climb forever. Target customer: rock climbing gyms.

More general idea spaces

These ideas are the genres I want to target, either because I think it is a trend that is increasing and has forward potential, or because I am personally interested in it.

1. Tools for drone pilots / enthusiasts
2. Tools for twitch streamers / gamers. I don’t play many games but the market is huge.
3. Anything related to tracking statistics in China and India
4. Anything related to equity markets
5. Anything subscription service
6. Connected devices
7. Developer tools
8. Various crypto tools - e.g. rebroadcast a transaction
9. Things having to do with money and careers. These are always potentially popular.
10. Something with chatbots.