Rodney's List of Product Ideas

Last updated on 2016-2-25 by Rodney Folz

My ever-growing list of ideas I’ve had. Take as many as you like – they all are terrible.

The Ideas

trello silver

Trello Gold’s fancy backgrounds are a body{ background-image: } away from being customized. Write a chrome extension / firefox addon to sync per-board custom images with anyone else on the board.

bobarocket

A long time ago when I had money, my friends and I had a group chat called "bobarocket". If any of us were passing by a boba shop, we would say so in chat. Everyone else would respond with their boba preferences, and the boba-passerby would buy everyone their preferred boba. Everyone would then venmo the buyer for boba. Make a (conversational?) app to streamline this.

groups app

A messenger.com-style interface for facebook groups. This was my intern project in 2012, but it got shuttered because facebook was trying to consolidate everything then. I would use the heck out of a dedicated groups client.

optout

As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Morgan Hill Concerned Parents’ Association, the private information (including social security #, address, etc) of 10 million California students will be disclosed to the MHCPA and put at risk. Opting out requires students to write a physical letter to the state. This is ridiculous friction. Write a webapp that uses the Lob API (or similar) to automate the sending of this opt-out letter.

converge

When I visit home, my friends and I will often want to hang out. Some of us have cars, some of us don’t. We all live in different places. We all want to go to the same place to hang out. Write a lyft-/carpool-style app that finds the optimal routes for friends with cars to pick up friends who need rides, based on location/travel time/seats in cars. A MVP based around the facebook event use case would be killer.

upvote ring

Instead of having to message my friends individually to upvote my stories on hacker news and reddit, write a (opt-in) web and/or mobile push notification whenever a friend submits a story and add a CTA to upvote. Bonus points for “intelligently” trickling out notifications over time so that upvote detectors aren’t tripped.

gifap

[nsfw] Source gifs from reddit’s nsfw gif subreddits and stream them to a RES-style client for viewing. Use behavioral information (time spent on gif, clickthroughs to source, “users who liked this gif also liked” clustering) to intelligently recommend more gifs that the user will probably like.

feedless

Extend News Feed Eradicator to support twitter, instagram, github, etc etc.

socratic CS

I’m a firm believer in the idea that to grow as a programmer, you have to engage in socratic dialog with the problems you’re working on. A key component of this is to have someone smarter than you (often Google) who you can bounce questions off of and get solid replies in return. A lot of the questions that beginners ask are nigh-identical, so create a Facebook M-style AI that can answer these questions and use the trained question/answer data to improve responses.

magic mirror

Combine this smart mirror with the openface facial recognition engine and make a magic mirror that changes what it shows based on who’s standing in front of it.

and more??

Check back every so often – as I have even more bad ideas, I’ll add them to the top of this article. I’d love to hear if these ideas become a reality (or already exist). Let me know if you’re inspired to build out any!

You can also find me @rodneyfolz on Twitter.