A Solo Maker's Journey

A small personal project to keep a running list of all the books I want to read.

Allow arm-chair travelers who are stuck at home to connect with a local in the city they wish they could travel to who will virtually walk them through their home town and/or historic sites. Personalized virtual tours from the comfort of your home, guided by a local.

A job board targeting job seekers looking for remote work. Aggregates remote job offers from other job platforms via APIs and display them with links back to the original job board. Allow companies to post jobs directly on the site.

Allow users to create personal reading lists and share and track their progress as they read through their lists. Members can chat with other users, form groups (‘book clubs’) to discuss books, and receive ‘points’ for reading streaks, finishing books and their list, etc. Provide a ‘leaders board’ of users who have read the most books so users can judge their progress and provide motivation to continue reading more.

Invite friends and family to create gift wishlists so that you (and other friends and family) can reduce stress around holidays/birthdays and shop for gifts off the lists. List creators can not see what (if anything) has been purchased from the list. Invited group members that are NOT the list creator CAN see what items others have purchased from the list so that they do not also purchase this gift.

• Web Development Tutorials: Build out articles and video tutorials to help non-technical founders quickly gain the technical knowledge to build their startups without needing a technical founder.
• Include a Social element where a community of users can stay accountable to groups and each other on their journey to be better developers.
• Implement a ‘mentor’ function where users can ask questions of specific community members designated as ‘Mentors’ and get 1-on-1 feedback, rewarding mentors with ‘knowledge points’ in the process.

Social soccer score/match picker for soccer/football fans. Focusing on multiple soccer leagues and competitions, even amateur ones. Creating a place where average soccer fans can amicably compete with one another to show they know more about soccer than anyone else.Users can predict match scores, share insights of their favorite teams via in-app chat, user-created blog posts. Gamification on who predicts match outcomes more accurately, who gets more upvotes for match and team write-ups, etc.

An online gathering place for backpackers, students, and families traveling to Europe to share trip ideas, download trip itineraries, book local tours, trains, accommodations, airfare, connect with other travelers, budget for their trips, store and share their trip details, and a lot more.

This is the grand-daddy of my ideas – the largest and the one closest to my heart. This is the project I should have focused on 20 years ago and should be the one that is providing me my financial freedom now. Maybe I should solely focus on this and not any of the others, but since I have never completed this project, I am going to follow the advice of successful makers, and build out an MVP version of this with the expectation that i may have to move on to something else if it does not gain traction.

Store favorite recipes and create menus from selected recipes for weekly meals. Invite family members to rate recipes so that you know which recipes to keep and which to remove. Include gamification for eating and preparing meals. Basically a novel way for users to curate favorite recipes and schedule meals they like, gameification is for helping children eat new / more diverse meals and family chefs to prepare more meals in the home.

A new Indie Hacker podcast talked about a bit of entrepreneur advice that states “it takes 1,000 days to get to a point of success with a start-up”. The goal of this project will be to allow solo makers and founders to track their progress and maintain focus for those first 1,000 days.

Also: A graphical tool showing your current income vs. the daily increase of your start-up revenue, with a focus on the point where you need to get your revenue to to outpace your salary. A nice display of how close you are to becoming financially independent and going full time with your start-up.

Challenge a friend over a number of days (i.e. 30) and ‘compete’ against each other to get an MVP launched. If you do not know other makers, get paired with other makers from the community and compete against them in an agreed upon timeframe.

Allow parents, teachers, coaches, etc. to track the activities of kids that contribute to desired achievements. Provide points and virtual badges to help keep kids motivated and aware of their progress for individual merit awards. Allow parents to take photos of projects done at the home, catalog articles/resources gathered for achievements, and award an arbitrary point system to provide extra incentive to children to complete tasks towards their merit badges.

Challenge friends to a fitness goal and earn points to climb the leaderboard in your group and against the world.

A WordPress theme for soccer/football clubs to showcase their results, standings, players, and sponsors; accept payments for match tickets or online store; and show match screencasts/embedded video from local files/Youtube/Vimeo.

A WordPress theme that allows hostels to create an independent online presence, showcase their facilities, and accept bookings/payments.

A custom WordPress theme that a local European tour company can use to display their tour services, charge users, get bookings, and followup with Email/Social accounts for feedback.

List of habits you want to form or break. Each habit is given a reward item ($$, snack, activity, etc) Each day you select whether you were successful in doing/avoiding the habit. Each 21-day streak per habit you are rewarded with a badge and an ok to reward yourself with the reward item for this habit. Basically, you are paying yourself to build / break a habit. Ideally, there would be an objective 3rd party (friend/family) invited to confirm each day the habit was built/broken, but cheating only hurts the user in the long run.

A honey fund app for couples to set up registries for honeymoon gifts/home purchases/ etc instead of traditional wedding gifts/cash cards. This could be tweaked to be used for birthdays, Christmas, baby showers, etc.

Users can track the cost of the meals they eat out so they have a better idea of what they spend and can reduce this spending by setting weekly and/or monthly budgets to spend within.

Users can create a Todo list and assign themselves and/or family members tasks to complete. Each task can be given a dollar (other currency) value and for each task completed, that user gets the amount placed in his ‘bank’. The user’s bank can be transferred offline to the user from the account owner. Basically a novel way to track children’s chores and allowance, and financially motivate one’s self to complete more.

A web app for families to stay connected and share online. Sure, you can say it’s ‘like Facebook’, but I’m not trying to make the next Facebook here. Families can sign up, invite other family members, plan events, chat, post family updates/news, and share photos/video. Family members can each have their own profile, with a hub-like family page tying them all together.