3 Approaches to Generate Business and Side-Project Ideas
In order to land my first design job and start my venture, I did over 10 side-projects/case studies over the span of 4 months (January to April 2017) while being a full-time student. I was then able to initiate a startup during the following summer which now has traction and generates revenue (More details provided on another post). I was generating all these ideas quickly because I prioritized quantity over quality and I focused on solving problems I cared about. As a result, I spent months practicing how to breakdown complex problems and find multiple solutions which helped me develop a good problem-solving process.
On one Medium post, I explained how to start a side-project. In this post, I will dive deeper on how I generate ideas. They are so many ways of generating ideas. Defining what is a great idea is really subjective and depends on different variables. In this post, I will consider the types of approaches I use to generate ideas.
1. Look for Personal Problems
In my opinion, this is the best way to come up with ideas. I always advise people to start by identifying problems occurring to them within their day-to-day lives because it is easier for them to empathize with these issues. Solving your own problem is a great way to learn how to use design tools such as user journeys, personas, and empathy maps because you would be using them on yourself. The goal is to focus on generating multiple ideas (I usually aim for 10 ideas) and then narrowing down to one. Practice making sure that you are not thinking of solutions until the very end of the process.
If you happen to get stuck, look for inspiration from other case studies. There are lots of resources you can find on the process of going from a problem to a solution. For startup founders and designers, the main goal of this approach is to help in developing a process to systematically come up with good ideas that people would be willing to try and give you quick feedback on.
Early Work: Bistro App
This project initially came about because I was trying to find a bar to grab beer with friends. Therefore, I thought of an app that would help me find the closest beer! I initially called it Bbeer. Thinking back, it was a terrible idea. However, it is one of the projects I learned to most from.
I gave myself a prompt: “Design an app that helps me find the closest beer” and I ended up using personas, 5 whys, and competitive analysis in order to understand and breakdown the problem. I got so passionate by this project that I ended up doing usability testing and I used an app builder to build it and ship it on the Google Play Store. I was able to get feedback on the idea and the process which still guides my design and entrepreneurial practices to this day.
For the sake of my resume and interviews, I rebranded Bbeer into Bistro App.
2. Social Impact
These types of problems are often easier to discover because millions of people around the world are affected by it. The easiest way to find them is by following the news. There are a lot of organizations that create challenges from these social issues and lots of organizations which also reward winners for their solutions.
Here are some of them:
Early Work: OpenIDEO Challenge & Unemployment Project
These problems are the hardest to solve because of their systemic nature, but they are the most rewarding and you will learn a lot from working on these. The ideas you can generate from working on these problems have the potential to be really impactful. Most of my projects are social good related and working on these types of problems have taught me about system’s theory, design research, business strategy, etc. The learnings I got from working on social good projects were crucial in helping me develop the skills to work on my own startup which eventually led me to get a UX Design job at Google.
3. Be Visionary by Using Strategic Foresight
If you truly understand strategic foresight, you may skip the next paragraph.
This method is more abstract and requires more in-depth thinking. This approach is about using the strategic foresight process to envision the different states of the future. This process usually starts by identifying keys events that called signals that provide insights into the future. The goal is to synthesize these signals in order to identify trends that will affect different states of the future. Trends can be classified into six categories: social, technological, economics, environment, political, and value. You can then use these trends to understand how different state of the future could look like.
In order to generate ideas, you need to anticipate and be proactive toward how you have envisioned and defined the future. After going through the process, the goal is to identify future problems, unmet needs, and opportunities. Once these problems have been identified, you need to understand what can be done today that will help in addressing these unmet needs.
My friend wrote a great piece on how to work through the process: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rapid-foresight-canvas-critically-think-future-sajan-mathew-/
First Internship Project: UNICEF Foresight
I haven’t done a lot of foresight projects, but here is some foresight work I did during one of my internships 2 years ago. Feel free to take inspiration from it.
Here’s a foresight project I did for fun: Foresight Trends
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me!
