Recently, when reading more into better blogging, I came across this key point:

Try to solve someone’s problem and you’ll get readers

Sound familiar? Yup, this is a number 1 rule for startups: solve a problem and you’ll be successful. But not all business ideas are made equal and this is when I quickly started thinking about resurrecting a dead project of mine: Idealarm.

Idealarm

My vision for Idealarm is to basically have a huge idea cauldron.

Users would post business ideas to get feedback from other business-savvy users and in return, receive valuable information about his or her ‘great’ idea (whether it’s actually worth anything, been done before, killer money maker, etc.)

I originally wrote about the power of idea sharing in late-February after Steve Poland noted:

Break-down the wall of fear that “Someone is going to steal my idea if I talk about it!” — IT’S JUST AN IDEA. Go get people’s PRICELESS feedback on your idea, evolve it, and execute. If someone stole your idea during that process, you’re 49 people ahead of them in finding out how to truly evolve it into something that will work. Execution is the key. Don’t execute until you know from 50 people’s perspectives that you’ll be executing properly.

Status: Majority of code was finished (in PHP). Then finals week came out of nowhere, then graduation and soon afterwards, the need to learn Ruby on Rails took over as well as constant packing, shopping and getting ready for the big move across the country.

I’m planning on resurrecting this project in the coming months when I get some free time. I should be able to knock this one off rather quickly (at least the main features) in Ruby on Rails in no time.

Thoughts on this? Few people that I talked to about this loved both the idea and the name. Still, I’d like to hear more feedback.

BillSense

Personal Finance Manager?

Welcome to another unfortunately-dead project of mine: BillSense.

Here’s a problem I was solving:

As I embark on the new chapter of my life, I wanted to be better at managing my finances (after all, I’m a Finance major!)

Yet, I couldn’t find the best tool to assist me in my quest. MS Money is great, yet it’s only for PCs and I’m a Mac user. Quicken for Mac is outdated. Other Mac options include iBank and the new player in the game, ChaChing, both of which I’ve tried, but there weren’t doing it for me for reasons I can’t recall right now.

I was looking for basic management and these applications provided way too much.

So, I set out to make something of my own, but the lack of skill to tackle on this big job haunted me and I didn’t know where to start.

Time went by and soon Mint was announced. I’m still waiting for Mint’s beta invitation and have high hopes for it. I hope it’ll solve that same problem I was trying to.

Mint has investors, a team and Noah Kagan to top it all off. How do I compete with that? As Bryan Veloso recently noted, competition is good for innovation, but I don’t have the time nor resources to build something great at this point.

Status: On hold until another great idea or until I can get funds, time and interest into building a personal finance manager.

Are you currently trying to solve a problem?