Just a thought

My $1 million idea:

I’ve decided to start an idea factory. It will consist of start-up ideas, or methodologies that I am too busy to work on/or will possibly never work on as they are far removed from my own experience. I am hoping someone in cyberspace will pick them up and implement them. No royalties needed. 😉 Just give me some props/credit when you make it big (although this may be too much to ask for in today’s world).

I build products for the people around me, for my friends, my family, and for myself. These are all distinct cohort/customer segments, mind you.

I have friends in many different professions, and with a wide variety of interests. My family is based globally and comprises of several age groups. And as you can probably tell by now, I am pretty eclectic myself. I think that I can do a fair job of discovering the world and people around me to build something that caters perfectly to their needs.

Having said that, I have the ability to empathize with people who are far, far removed from my world. And occasionally, I do have ideas on how to help them solve problems too. So here goes.

IDEA #1: Applying the concepts of The Lean Start-up to Bollywood!

The major issue that Bollywood producers have is not being able to tell what audiences want. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious and formidable one being the sheer variety of sub-cultures and mindsets that exist in one country of a billion people. How does one possibly test a minimum viable product with a randomized sample in a country of 1 billion people? Especially when the country has 150 different languages and sub-cultures. Add to that the complexity of testing with a variety of age groups and you can compute the combinations required to create a perfectly random sample from this mix as well as the size of the sample.

I would imagine the problem could be successfully solved in this manner.

1. Test a story/idea with an audience at a local level via youtube. Get a few actors to do a 5 minute skit of the story idea. Really short and sweet. Do not attach your brand name to it, and post the video under the name of a relatively unknown youtube user. Attach relevant tags that you think would appeal to your early adopter segment.
2. Measure. Look at analytics. What age groups seem to like the idea? What kinds of suggestions are they posting? What do they dislike about the story? Get a conversation going. Now, youtube commenters are not known for their eloquence or literary prowess but you will easily be able to tell which plot points they liked/disliked by engaging them.
3. Learn. Benchmark your performance and figure out if your prototype test was successful. Rinse and repeat. (Choose a different platform this time, maybe a group of writers and a focus group)

Applying the concepts of The Lean Startup to Picturesque

Long story short, I realized that my progress on Picturesque was slower than I would have liked. I wanted to put the app in front of customers, but was not getting enough traction.

I decided to join forces with a team based at the University of Toronto, whose name I will not reveal as it is a fledgling company.

My goal is to suggest my product idea and test it with early adopters that they already have access to. I already know that this will prove to be a significant value add to their company. It is a leap-of-faith hypothesis as Eric Ries would say. Now, I have to convince the team of the same.

Update on my Swift adventures

So I’ve built a nifty little application based on my Picturesque idea using Swift. The most important analytics I will be gathering via the app are based on the following events.

1. OnClick: Although the application doesn’t have a click based UI, people will undoubtedly pause and transition images. I will be tracking this behavior to see how frequently this happens.

2. Time: I’m interested in tracking how many times during the day the app is opened and for how many seconds, minutes, hours the app is used, on average. This is important validation to help me determine the usefulness of the app.

Thoughts on Swift: I can hardly imagine using objective C, which has bulky and unnecessary syntax, and is way less accessible to use. It would probably take twice as long to learn. Very thankful that Apple made the switch.