AirBnB for dogs
Are you thinking of building a new website? Or an app? AirBnB for dogs? A Groupon/Twitter/Facebook mashup? Mobile first? Sometimes it’s kind of hard to see, it looks like all the good ideas are taken already, and we can only combine existing ones. It’s all kinds of products. As an app developer, I sometimes think all the apps are already built.
I had a perfectly good idea two months ago: a YouTube remote, where you control YouTube from your iPhone. It exists: TubeMote. I think it’s executed very well, better than the execution I had in mind.
As a small gig, I was asked a little while ago to write the functional design for a new website of a medium-sized trading company that sells and rents out big hydraulic machines. They were one of the first companies in their branch with a website, about 10 years ago. They never updated it.
Even though the company makes a significant amount of money from international customers who find them through the website, they didn’t do anything about the site. It’s not that they were putting it off: they just didn’t realize it, and didn’t really care about it.
The new website will be optimized for search engines, organized pages, with explanations about the products, videos, good copywriting, well-thought out navigation, a decent visual design and prepared for mobile browsers.
Driving home from one of the meetings I realized: we’re just at the beginning. There is still so much stuff to build. Instead of building YouTube remotes, we should get out there and talk to companies outside of IT. We need to build the stuff they need. I thought the apps market was saturated, but there are still so many companies who don’t even have a decent website yet. Let’s help them.