The Idea

Here's the worst part of it all.

Some people may believe in idealess entrepreneurs, but I don't. I for one, believe that if you really want to grab someone's interest you must have a bright idea, many ambitions, and a personality that reflects these ambitions.

But still this is all about getting that very first idea. How to find it? Can you force it?

Keep in mind that I'm currently alone in my adventure and some tips may be more appropriate for one-developer-organizations.

No you can't, but you can attract it to you though.

There won't be any miracle cure in this article, but a simple list of how I got mine, what really did work for me.

Find a problem and think about how you could fix it.

This sounds easy at first, but it is unfortunately not. Here's how I think it should be done:

Observe yourself each day, I mean really, look at what you do, and what's annoying about it. What program do you use for doing something else than what it has made been for? What workaround do you take to get something achieved? I heard you swear? Why did you? How could you prevent it to happen again?

Those are all questions that could make you think about something that would make your life and probably a lot of other's lives easier.

Talk with other people

One thing that motivated me a lot was, hanging around in StackOverflow Chat, brainstorming about new ideas for my framework, debating about how to build them and the best part: actually learning a lot from others.

This knowledge is super important, it is the fuel for your idea, what will make them work, what turns dreams into realities.

Also as a very important bonus: you'll get to know people, good people, very good people and will even contribute to your ideas.

Code, a lot.

Do you have a GitHub account? No?! JUST DO IT RIGHT NOW!

If you want people's interest, you should show them what you're working on. That is why the framework I'm using for my project is one I developed on GitHub, which is 100% open-sourced. That helped me get many people's attention, and some of them even contributed! Which is excellent.

Here's one thing I love to say in real life:

The thing I love the most in life is to be wrong: because whenever you're wrong, you've got something to learn and improve on.

That applies in coding. When people fork your code, and makes pull requests to it, don't be angry, be grateful. You know, there may be something you can learn in there. Nobody's perfect, and neither are you.

Reinvent the wheel

The last point I'll be throwing at you today is this classic.

We're in 2012 right now, and creating something totally new is almost impossible. And even if you would do it, I'm sure it wouldn't get anybody's attention. Why? Because people are used to the way things work right now.

If you want someone to try something new, you must bridge them to it. What I mean by bridge is, there should be a user friendly feature/guide/tutorial that tells them what concept you did take, and how you did change it. That way your user will know what's the purpose of it, and instead of reflecting their worries they might finally adopt it. This is very good because these who got this working are the ones that pushed today's boundaries and made the industry the way it is right now.

That's it for today folks.

This is how I got my things working for now, I don't know if I helped somebody if so then, please leave a comment below, it'll be a total pleasure for me to respond to them.

Thanks for reading, you can follow me on twitter @tommybergeron or Brainpad's twitter.

/tommy