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One of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project?
Maybe something that looks good in my portfolio, something that makes money, or both.
It's not very easy to build something that that stands out.
So today, I present you with 7 somewhat random and unusual app ideas, and you're free to use these ideas and make money off them as long as you Scribe and hit the like button.
Now before we get into the ideas, there's a few things you need to know.
Ideas are cheap.
Execution is everything.
When you come up with a great idea, it's probably not unique.
There's going to be 100, if not 1000 of other developers out there with the same idea.
What's not cheap is the execution.
That takes real time, intelligence, and money.
Now with that in mind, I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas, and we'll also talk about how to monetize them.
My first idea falls into the category of data aggregation, in, where you start with some data or information and add value to it.
In the United States, there's a very obvious schism in the way the news is reported.
At any given moment, you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other, and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from 2 different universes.
This app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes, allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these 2 different sites.
So it's kind of similar to the way back machine web archiving service, but obviously a much more specific use case.
And now the question becomes, how do we execute this idea?
I would set up a scheduled PubSub Cloud function with Firebase.
That would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with Node.
Js.
Inside that function, I would use Puppeteer, which is a headless Chromium Browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN.
I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it.
This data would then be saved in a storage bucket.
And at that point, all you have to do is create a client side app to view the content.
And that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history.
Easy enough, but how do you monetize something like this?
You could display advertisements, although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here.
I think this idea should fall under fair use, but check with your lawyer first.
If you're more concerned about making money, you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments.
You could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee, and my Stripe course can help you do that.
Let's move on to idea number 2, which falls under the broad category of building something data driven.
Understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable.
But unless you're a massive tech company, acquiring high quality data can be difficult.
One of the best free sources is Kaggle.
There's all kinds of open source datasets, and every year, they have a big competition for March Madness Basketball.
For this idea, we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament.
The data, of course, can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project.
You could do all of this directly in Kaggle, or you could add your data to a data warehouse like BigQuery.
Once you have the data there, you can visualize it and create a Python Jupyter Notebook in the cloud.
In the case of BigQuery, you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ML knowledge yourself, and this can all be done in a Jupyter Notebook and made available on the web.
You could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas.
Now let's move on to idea number 3, which falls into the very popular category of photo editing.
This idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps.
The idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters.
I was actually looking for an app like this recently, and they're out there, but I just wasn't satisfied with the results.
So there might be an opportunity to build a better app here.
It could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters, or maybe you could even use emojis here.
Here's one way you might build it.
I would start with the Flutter app.
There are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device.
Once you capture an image, you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255.
Then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji.
You can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters.
You can then monetize it by selling premium filters as microtransactions or in app purchases.
And that brings us to idea number 4, which falls under the game category.
A web based game I really like is GeoGuessr.
It takes you to a street view somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map.
The closer you are, the more points you get.
The only problem is that after you play a few games, you'll have to upgrade to a membership.
You should definitely support independent game developers, but as an alternative, you might just reverse engineer the entire game.
One way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time.
So my idea here is to create an MMO version of GeoGuessr.
That might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas.
It's actually easier than you might think.
The first step is to build a web application that integrates the Google Maps JavaScript SDK.
From there, you can use Firebase and Firestore to create a real time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to.
You could then use a scheduled cloud function or back end server to flip a game to active, and then calculate all the scores in the background.
If you do build this app, you'll definitely wanna monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale.
You can start by monetizing with ads, but that likely won't be enough, so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines.
In fact, if you're interested in building a real time game, then David East and I will be doing exactly that on his channel next a tweak using Svelte and Firebase, so make sure to set up a notification on his channel.
Another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various APIs out there offer.
One of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice, text, and facts.
The cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers.
So here's my idea.
An app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity.
Imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life.
The app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a one mile radius.
To implement something like this, you could start with Firebase phone authentication.
That would give you a phone number to work with.
Then whenever 2 users start a conversation, you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together.
Now in your client side application, like Flutter, for example, you'd be keeping track of the user's geographic location.
When the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other, You destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages.
An app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send.
They might get the first ten messages for free, then after that, have to buy credits to send additional messages.
Now let's segue into idea number 6, which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators.
People love to fill out surveys and get useful information returned back to them.
Examples include things like net worth calculators or Enneagrams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality.
And other apps like Social Blade will retrieve data from a third party API and create an analysis about a social media account.
So here's my idea.
Now more than ever, companies need to save money.
You could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that a company is currently using.
You could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
This could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing.
Implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end.
You'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like Angular, React, or Vue, and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the user's data.
Once you have that data, you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing.
Now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly, but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts.
And now we're ready for idea number 7.
The world is currently a crazy place, and there's a ton of people working from home.
I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future.
However, I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere.
It'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like Slack or Discord.
However, these platforms allow you, the developer, to extend their software by building your own app.
They're pretty easy to build, and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home.
So here's my idea.
It's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold asynchronous meetings.
A person can start a meeting over video, and then other users can respond with video as well.
When the meeting is over, all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later.
So it's kind of like the Marco Polo app, but more business oriented and directly integrated into Slack.
If I were to build an app like this today, I'd start by looking into the AWS Amplify video plug in.
It seems to provide a very easy path for getting real time video integrated into a web or mobile app, and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward.
I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there.
If you end up building one of these apps, please let me know so we can feature it on the channel.
And if you wanna learn how to build an app from scratch, consider becoming a pro member at FireShip IO.
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.

Speaker 0: One of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project? Maybe something that looks good in my portfolio, something that makes money, or both. It's not very easy to build something that that stands out. So today, I present you with 7 somewhat random and unusual app ideas, and you're free to use these ideas and make money off them as long as you Scribe and hit the like button. Now before we get into the ideas, there's a few things you need to know.

Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. When you come up with a great idea, it's probably not unique. There's going to be 100, if not 1000 of other developers out there with the same idea. What's not cheap is the execution.

That takes real time, intelligence, and money. Now with that in mind, I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas, and we'll also talk about how to monetize them. My first idea falls into the category of data aggregation, in, where you start with some data or information and add value to it. In the United States, there's a very obvious schism in the way the news is reported. At any given moment, you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other, and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from 2 different universes.

This app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes, allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these 2 different sites. So it's kind of similar to the way back machine web archiving service, but obviously a much more specific use case. And now the question becomes, how do we execute this idea? I would set up a scheduled PubSub Cloud function with Firebase. That would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with Node.

Js. Inside that function, I would use Puppeteer, which is a headless Chromium Browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN. I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it. This data would then be saved in a storage bucket. And at that point, all you have to do is create a client side app to view the content.

And that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history. Easy enough, but how do you monetize something like this? You could display advertisements, although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here. I think this idea should fall under fair use, but check with your lawyer first. If you're more concerned about making money, you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments.

You could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee, and my Stripe course can help you do that. Let's move on to idea number 2, which falls under the broad category of building something data driven. Understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable. But unless you're a massive tech company, acquiring high quality data can be difficult. One of the best free sources is Kaggle.

There's all kinds of open source datasets, and every year, they have a big competition for March Madness Basketball. For this idea, we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament. The data, of course, can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project. You could do all of this directly in Kaggle, or you could add your data to a data warehouse like BigQuery. Once you have the data there, you can visualize it and create a Python Jupyter Notebook in the cloud.

In the case of BigQuery, you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ML knowledge yourself, and this can all be done in a Jupyter Notebook and made available on the web. You could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas. Now let's move on to idea number 3, which falls into the very popular category of photo editing. This idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps. The idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters.

I was actually looking for an app like this recently, and they're out there, but I just wasn't satisfied with the results. So there might be an opportunity to build a better app here. It could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters, or maybe you could even use emojis here. Here's one way you might build it. I would start with the Flutter app.

There are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device. Once you capture an image, you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255. Then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji. You can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters. You can then monetize it by selling premium filters as microtransactions or in app purchases.

And that brings us to idea number 4, which falls under the game category. A web based game I really like is GeoGuessr. It takes you to a street view somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map. The closer you are, the more points you get. The only problem is that after you play a few games, you'll have to upgrade to a membership.

You should definitely support independent game developers, but as an alternative, you might just reverse engineer the entire game. One way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time. So my idea here is to create an MMO version of GeoGuessr. That might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas. It's actually easier than you might think.

The first step is to build a web application that integrates the Google Maps JavaScript SDK. From there, you can use Firebase and Firestore to create a real time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to. You could then use a scheduled cloud function or back end server to flip a game to active, and then calculate all the scores in the background. If you do build this app, you'll definitely wanna monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale. You can start by monetizing with ads, but that likely won't be enough, so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines.

In fact, if you're interested in building a real time game, then David East and I will be doing exactly that on his channel next a tweak using Svelte and Firebase, so make sure to set up a notification on his channel. Another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various APIs out there offer. One of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice, text, and facts. The cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers. So here's my idea.

An app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity. Imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life. The app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a one mile radius. To implement something like this, you could start with Firebase phone authentication. That would give you a phone number to work with.

Then whenever 2 users start a conversation, you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together. Now in your client side application, like Flutter, for example, you'd be keeping track of the user's geographic location. When the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other, You destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages. An app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send. They might get the first ten messages for free, then after that, have to buy credits to send additional messages.

Now let's segue into idea number 6, which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators. People love to fill out surveys and get useful information returned back to them. Examples include things like net worth calculators or Enneagrams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality. And other apps like Social Blade will retrieve data from a third party API and create an analysis about a social media account. So here's my idea.

Now more than ever, companies need to save money. You could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that a company is currently using. You could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing. Implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end.

You'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like Angular, React, or Vue, and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the user's data. Once you have that data, you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing. Now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly, but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts. And now we're ready for idea number 7. The world is currently a crazy place, and there's a ton of people working from home.

I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future. However, I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere. It'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like Slack or Discord. However, these platforms allow you, the developer, to extend their software by building your own app. They're pretty easy to build, and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home.

So here's my idea. It's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold asynchronous meetings. A person can start a meeting over video, and then other users can respond with video as well. When the meeting is over, all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later. So it's kind of like the Marco Polo app, but more business oriented and directly integrated into Slack.

If I were to build an app like this today, I'd start by looking into the AWS Amplify video plug in. It seems to provide a very easy path for getting real time video integrated into a web or mobile app, and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there. If you end up building one of these apps, please let me know so we can feature it on the channel. And if you wanna learn how to build an app from scratch, consider becoming a pro member at FireShip IO.

Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
One of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project? Maybe something that looks good in my portfolio, something that makes money, or both. It's not very easy to build something that that stands out. So today, I present you with 7 somewhat random and unusual app ideas, and you're free to use these ideas and make money off them as long as you Scribe and hit the like button. Now before we get into the ideas, there's a few things you need to know.
crafts
toys
Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. When you come up with a great idea, it's probably not unique.
There's going to be 100, if not 1000 of other developers out there with the same idea. What's not cheap is the execution. That takes real time, intelligence, and money. Now with that in mind, I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas, and we'll also talk about how to monetize them. My first idea falls into the category of data aggregation, in, where you start with some data or information and add value to it. In the United States, there's a very obvious schism in the way the news is reported. At any given moment, you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other, and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from 2 different universes.
data management
databases
architecture
intellectual property
computer science
news
journalism
data
software development
This app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes, allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these 2 different sites. So it's kind of similar to the way back machine web archiving service, but obviously a much more specific use case.
google
And now the question becomes, how do we execute this idea? I would set up a scheduled PubSub Cloud function with Firebase. That would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with Node. Js. Inside that function, I would use Puppeteer, which is a headless Chromium Browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN. I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it. This data would then be saved in a storage bucket. And at that point, all you have to do is create a client side app to view the content.
And that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history. Easy enough, but how do you monetize something like this? You could display advertisements, although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here. I think this idea should fall under fair use, but check with your lawyer first. If you're more concerned about making money, you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments. You could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee, and my Stripe course can help you do that. Let's move on to idea number 2, which falls under the broad category of building something data driven. Understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable. But unless you're a massive tech company, acquiring high quality data can be difficult. One of the best free sources is Kaggle. There's all kinds of open source datasets, and every year, they have a big competition for March Madness Basketball.
copyright licenses
copyright
patents
intellectual property
data management
advertising
data
customer support
commerce
billing
customers
For this idea, we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament. The data, of course, can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project. You could do all of this directly in Kaggle, or you could add your data to a data warehouse like BigQuery. Once you have the data there, you can visualize it and create a Python Jupyter Notebook in the cloud. In the case of BigQuery, you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ML knowledge yourself, and this can all be done in a Jupyter Notebook and made available on the web. You could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas. Now let's move on to idea number 3, which falls into the very popular category of photo editing. This idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps. The idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters. I was actually looking for an app like this recently, and they're out there, but I just wasn't satisfied with the results.
machine learning
animation
deep learning
gambling
data
visualization
data analysis
graphic design
artificial intelligence
advertising
video gaming
databases
So there might be an opportunity to build a better app here.
It could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters, or maybe you could even use emojis here. Here's one way you might build it. I would start with the Flutter app. There are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device. Once you capture an image, you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255.
animation
Then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji.
You can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters. You can then monetize it by selling premium filters as microtransactions or in app purchases. And that brings us to idea number 4, which falls under the game category. A web based game I really like is GeoGuessr. It takes you to a street view somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map. The closer you are, the more points you get. The only problem is that after you play a few games, you'll have to upgrade to a membership. You should definitely support independent game developers, but as an alternative, you might just reverse engineer the entire game. One way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time. So my idea here is to create an MMO version of GeoGuessr.
video gaming
games
geography
That might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas.
It's actually easier than you might think. The first step is to build a web application that integrates the Google Maps JavaScript SDK. From there, you can use Firebase and Firestore to create a real time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to. You could then use a scheduled cloud function or back end server to flip a game to active, and then calculate all the scores in the background. If you do build this app, you'll definitely wanna monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale. You can start by monetizing with ads, but that likely won't be enough, so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines. In fact, if you're interested in building a real time game, then David East and I will be doing exactly that on his channel next a tweak using Svelte and Firebase, so make sure to set up a notification on his channel. Another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various APIs out there offer. One of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice, text, and facts. The cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers. So here's my idea. An app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity. Imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life. The app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a one mile radius. To implement something like this, you could start with Firebase phone authentication. That would give you a phone number to work with. Then whenever 2 users start a conversation, you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together. Now in your client side application, like Flutter, for example, you'd be keeping track of the user's geographic location. When the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other, You destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages.
games
phones
google
email
telecommunications
software development
advertising
An app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send. They might get the first ten messages for free, then after that, have to buy credits to send additional messages.
Now let's segue into idea number 6, which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators. People love to fill out surveys and get useful information returned back to them. Examples include things like net worth calculators or Enneagrams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality. And other apps like Social Blade will retrieve data from a third party API and create an analysis about a social media account. So here's my idea. Now more than ever, companies need to save money. You could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that a company is currently using. You could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing.
accounting
data
data analysis
machine learning
data management
intellectual property
revenue
Implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end. You'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like Angular, React, or Vue, and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the user's data. Once you have that data, you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing. Now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly, but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts. And now we're ready for idea number 7.
billing
customer support
The world is currently a crazy place, and there's a ton of people working from home. I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future. However, I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere. It'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like Slack or Discord.
However, these platforms allow you, the developer, to extend their software by building your own app. They're pretty easy to build, and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home. So here's my idea. It's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold asynchronous meetings. A person can start a meeting over video, and then other users can respond with video as well. When the meeting is over, all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later. So it's kind of like the Marco Polo app, but more business oriented and directly integrated into Slack. If I were to build an app like this today, I'd start by looking into the AWS Amplify video plug in. It seems to provide a very easy path for getting real time video integrated into a web or mobile app, and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward.
software
youtube
software development
video gaming
streaming
multimedia
architecture
television
podcasts
visualization
I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there. If you end up building one of these apps, please let me know so we can feature it on the channel.
And if you wanna learn how to build an app from scratch, consider becoming a pro member at FireShip IO. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
software development
One of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project? Maybe something that looks good in my portfolio, something that makes money, or both. It's not very easy to build something that that stands out. So today, I present you with 7 somewhat random and unusual app ideas, and you're free to use these ideas and make money off them as long as you Scribe and hit the like button. Now before we get into the ideas, there's a few things you need to know. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. When you come up with a great idea, it's probably not unique. There's going to be 100, if not 1000 of other developers out there with the same idea. What's not cheap is the execution. That takes real time, intelligence, and money. Now with that in mind, I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas, and we'll also talk about how to monetize them. My first idea falls into the category of data aggregation, in, where you start with some data or information and add value to it. In the United States, there's a very obvious schism in the way the news is reported. At any given moment, you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other, and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from 2 different universes. This app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes, allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these 2 different sites. So it's kind of similar to the way back machine web archiving service, but obviously a much more specific use case. And now the question becomes, how do we execute this idea? I would set up a scheduled PubSub Cloud function with Firebase. That would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with Node. Js. Inside that function, I would use Puppeteer, which is a headless Chromium Browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN. I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it. This data would then be saved in a storage bucket. And at that point, all you have to do is create a client side app to view the content. And that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history. Easy enough, but how do you monetize something like this? You could display advertisements, although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here. I think this idea should fall under fair use, but check with your lawyer first. If you're more concerned about making money, you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments. You could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee, and my Stripe course can help you do that. Let's move on to idea number 2, which falls under the broad category of building something data driven. Understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable. But unless you're a massive tech company, acquiring high quality data can be difficult. One of the best free sources is Kaggle. There's all kinds of open source datasets, and every year, they have a big competition for March Madness Basketball. For this idea, we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament. The data, of course, can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project. You could do all of this directly in Kaggle, or you could add your data to a data warehouse like BigQuery. Once you have the data there, you can visualize it and create a Python Jupyter Notebook in the cloud. In the case of BigQuery, you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ML knowledge yourself, and this can all be done in a Jupyter Notebook and made available on the web. You could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas. Now let's move on to idea number 3, which falls into the very popular category of photo editing. This idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps. The idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters. I was actually looking for an app like this recently, and they're out there, but I just wasn't satisfied with the results. So there might be an opportunity to build a better app here. It could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters, or maybe you could even use emojis here. Here's one way you might build it. I would start with the Flutter app. There are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device. Once you capture an image, you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255. Then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji. You can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters. You can then monetize it by selling premium filters as microtransactions or in app purchases. And that brings us to idea number 4, which falls under the game category. A web based game I really like is GeoGuessr. It takes you to a street view somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map. The closer you are, the more points you get. The only problem is that after you play a few games, you'll have to upgrade to a membership. You should definitely support independent game developers, but as an alternative, you might just reverse engineer the entire game. One way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time. So my idea here is to create an MMO version of GeoGuessr. That might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas. It's actually easier than you might think. The first step is to build a web application that integrates the Google Maps JavaScript SDK. From there, you can use Firebase and Firestore to create a real time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to. You could then use a scheduled cloud function or back end server to flip a game to active, and then calculate all the scores in the background. If you do build this app, you'll definitely wanna monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale. You can start by monetizing with ads, but that likely won't be enough, so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines. In fact, if you're interested in building a real time game, then David East and I will be doing exactly that on his channel next a tweak using Svelte and Firebase, so make sure to set up a notification on his channel. Another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various APIs out there offer. One of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice, text, and facts. The cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers. So here's my idea. An app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity. Imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life. The app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a one mile radius. To implement something like this, you could start with Firebase phone authentication. That would give you a phone number to work with. Then whenever 2 users start a conversation, you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together. Now in your client side application, like Flutter, for example, you'd be keeping track of the user's geographic location. When the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other, You destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages. An app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send. They might get the first ten messages for free, then after that, have to buy credits to send additional messages. Now let's segue into idea number 6, which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators. People love to fill out surveys and get useful information returned back to them. Examples include things like net worth calculators or Enneagrams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality. And other apps like Social Blade will retrieve data from a third party API and create an analysis about a social media account. So here's my idea. Now more than ever, companies need to save money. You could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that a company is currently using. You could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing. Implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end. You'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like Angular, React, or Vue, and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the user's data. Once you have that data, you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing. Now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly, but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts. And now we're ready for idea number 7. The world is currently a crazy place, and there's a ton of people working from home. I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future. However, I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere. It'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like Slack or Discord. However, these platforms allow you, the developer, to extend their software by building your own app. They're pretty easy to build, and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home. So here's my idea. It's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold asynchronous meetings. A person can start a meeting over video, and then other users can respond with video as well. When the meeting is over, all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later. So it's kind of like the Marco Polo app, but more business oriented and directly integrated into Slack. If I were to build an app like this today, I'd start by looking into the AWS Amplify video plug in. It seems to provide a very easy path for getting real time video integrated into a web or mobile app, and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there. If you end up building one of these apps, please let me know so we can feature it on the channel. And if you wanna learn how to build an app from scratch, consider becoming a pro member at FireShip IO. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
One
one
of
of
the
the
most
most
common
common
questions
questions
people
people
ask
ask
me
me
is
is
how
how
do
do
I
i
come
come
up
up
with
with
a
a
good
good
idea
idea
for
for
a
a
side
side
project?
project
Maybe
maybe
something
something
that
that
looks
looks
good
good
in
in
my
my
portfolio,
portfolio
something
something
that
that
makes
makes
money,
money
or
or
both.
both
It's
it's
not
not
very
very
easy
easy
to
to
build
build
something
something
that
that
that
that
stands
stands
out.
out
So
so
today,
today
I
i
present
present
you
you
with
with
7
7
somewhat
somewhat
random
random
and
and
unusual
unusual
app
app
ideas,
ideas
and
and
you're
you're
free
free
to
to
use
use
these
these
ideas
ideas
and
and
make
make
money
money
off
off
them
them
as
as
long
long
as
as
you
you
Scribe
scribe
and
and
hit
hit
the
the
like
like
button.
button
Now
now
before
before
we
we
get
get
into
into
the
the
ideas,
ideas
there's
there's
a
a
few
few
things
things
you
you
need
need
to
to
know.
know
Ideas
ideas
are
are
cheap.
cheap
Execution
execution
is
is
everything.
everything
When
when
you
you
come
come
up
up
with
with
a
a
great
great
idea,
idea
it's
it's
probably
probably
not
not
unique.
unique
There's
there's
going
going
to
to
be
be
100,
100
if
if
not
not
1000
1000
of
of
other
other
developers
developers
out
out
there
there
with
with
the
the
same
same
idea.
idea
What's
what's
not
not
cheap
cheap
is
is
the
the
execution.
execution
That
that
takes
takes
real
real
time,
time
intelligence,
intelligence
and
and
money.
money
Now
now
with
with
that
that
in
in
mind,
mind
I'm
i'm
also
also
going
going
to
to
show
show
you
you
the
the
architectural
architectural
patterns
patterns
and
and
technologies
technologies
you
you
can
can
use
use
to
to
execute
execute
these
these
ideas,
ideas
and
and
we'll
we'll
also
also
talk
talk
about
about
how
how
to
to
monetize
monetize
them.
them
My
my
first
first
idea
idea
falls
falls
into
into
the
the
category
category
of
of
data
data
aggregation,
aggregation
in,
in
where
where
you
you
start
start
with
with
some
some
data
data
or
or
information
information
and
and
add
add
value
value
to
to
it.
it
In
in
the
the
United
united
States,
states
there's
there's
a
a
very
very
obvious
obvious
schism
schism
in
in
the
the
way
way
the
the
news
news
is
is
reported.
reported
At
at
any
any
given
given
moment,
moment
you
you
can
can
pull
pull
up
up
CNN
cnn
in
in
one
one
tab
tab
and
and
Fox
fox
News
news
on
on
the
the
other,
other
and
and
you'll
you'll
often
often
find
find
headlines
headlines
that
that
seem
seem
to
to
come
come
from
from
2
2
different
different
universes.
universes
This
this
app
app
idea
idea
will
will
archive
archive
the
the
content
content
from
from
both
both
CNN
cnn
and
and
Fox
fox
News
news
every
every
15
15
minutes,
minutes
allowing
allowing
a
a
user
user
to
to
historically
historically
scroll
scroll
through
through
the
the
news
news
and
and
see
see
how
how
it's
it's
reported
reported
on
on
these
these
2
2
different
different
sites.
sites
So
so
it's
it's
kind
kind
of
of
similar
similar
to
to
the
the
way
way
back
back
machine
machine
web
web
archiving
archiving
service,
service
but
but
obviously
obviously
a
a
much
much
more
more
specific
specific
use
use
case.
case
And
and
now
now
the
the
question
question
becomes,
becomes
how
how
do
do
we
we
execute
execute
this
this
idea?
idea
I
i
would
would
set
set
up
up
a
a
scheduled
scheduled
PubSub
pubsub
Cloud
cloud
function
function
with
with
Firebase.
firebase
That
that
would
would
allow
allow
us
us
to
to
run
run
a
a
background
background
job
job
every
every
15
15
minutes
minutes
with
with
Node.
node
Js.
js
Inside
inside
that
that
function,
function
I
i
would
would
use
use
Puppeteer,
puppeteer
which
which
is
is
a
a
headless
headless
Chromium
chromium
Browser
browser
to
to
scrape
scrape
the
the
content
content
from
from
both
both
Fox
fox
and
and
CNN.
cnn
I
i
would
would
take
take
a
a
screenshot
screenshot
and
and
then
then
also
also
scrape
scrape
the
the
text
text
so
so
we
we
can
can
search
search
through
through
it.
it
This
this
data
data
would
would
then
then
be
be
saved
saved
in
in
a
a
storage
storage
bucket.
bucket
And
and
at
at
that
that
point,
point
all
all
you
you
have
have
to
to
do
do
is
is
create
create
a
a
client
client
side
side
app
app
to
to
view
view
the
the
content.
content
And
and
that
that
could
could
be
be
as
as
simple
simple
as
as
a
a
calendar
calendar
that
that
allows
allows
your
your
user
user
to
to
navigate
navigate
to
to
any
any
day
day
in
in
history.
history
Easy
easy
enough,
enough
but
but
how
how
do
do
you
you
monetize
monetize
something
something
like
like
this?
this
You
you
could
could
display
display
advertisements,
advertisements
although
although
I
i
think
think
copyright
copyright
ownership
ownership
might
might
be
be
an
an
issue
issue
here.
here
I
i
think
think
this
this
idea
idea
should
should
fall
fall
under
under
fair
fair
use,
use
but
but
check
check
with
with
your
your
lawyer
lawyer
first.
first
If
if
you're
you're
more
more
concerned
concerned
about
about
making
making
money,
money
you
you
might
might
offer
offer
web
web
archiving
archiving
as
as
a
a
service
service
to
to
companies
companies
that
that
want
want
to
to
view
view
a
a
history
history
of
of
their
their
web
web
deployments.
deployments
You
you
could
could
bill
bill
your
your
customers
customers
with
with
a
a
monthly
monthly
subscription
subscription
fee,
fee
and
and
my
my
Stripe
stripe
course
course
can
can
help
help
you
you
do
do
that.
that
Let's
let's
move
move
on
on
to
to
idea
idea
number
number
2,
2
which
which
falls
falls
under
under
the
the
broad
broad
category
category
of
of
building
building
something
something
data
data
driven.
driven
Understanding
understanding
how
how
to
to
work
work
with
with
and
and
visualize
visualize
data
data
is
is
extremely
extremely
valuable.
valuable
But
but
unless
unless
you're
you're
a
a
massive
massive
tech
tech
company,
company
acquiring
acquiring
high
high
quality
quality
data
data
can
can
be
be
difficult.
difficult
One
one
of
of
the
the
best
best
free
free
sources
sources
is
is
Kaggle.
kaggle
There's
there's
all
all
kinds
kinds
of
of
open
open
source
source
datasets,
datasets
and
and
every
every
year,
year
they
they
have
have
a
a
big
big
competition
competition
for
for
March
march
Madness
madness
Basketball.
basketball
For
for
this
this
idea,
idea
we
we
use
use
historical
historical
data
data
to
to
build
build
a
a
predictive
predictive
model
model
for
for
next
next
year's
year's
tournament.
tournament
The
the
data,
data
of
of
course,
course
can
can
be
be
visualized
visualized
and
and
would
would
make
make
an
an
awesome
awesome
portfolio
portfolio
project.
project
You
you
could
could
do
do
all
all
of
of
this
this
directly
directly
in
in
Kaggle,
kaggle
or
or
you
you
could
could
add
add
your
your
data
data
to
to
a
a
data
data
warehouse
warehouse
like
like
BigQuery.
bigquery
Once
once
you
you
have
have
the
the
data
data
there,
there
you
you
can
can
visualize
visualize
it
it
and
and
create
create
a
a
Python
python
Jupyter
jupyter
Notebook
notebook
in
in
the
the
cloud.
cloud
In
in
the
the
case
case
of
of
BigQuery,
bigquery
you
you
can
can
run
run
machine
machine
learning
learning
models
models
directly
directly
on
on
this
this
data
data
without
without
any
any
ML
ml
knowledge
knowledge
yourself,
yourself
and
and
this
this
can
can
all
all
be
be
done
done
in
in
a
a
Jupyter
jupyter
Notebook
notebook
and
and
made
made
available
available
on
on
the
the
web.
web
You
you
could
could
monetize
monetize
it
it
by
by
offering
offering
a
a
premium
premium
report
report
for
for
people
people
who
who
play
play
fantasy
fantasy
sports
sports
or
or
for
for
Vegas.
vegas
Now
now
let's
let's
move
move
on
on
to
to
idea
idea
number
number
3,
3
which
which
falls
falls
into
into
the
the
very
very
popular
popular
category
category
of
of
photo
photo
editing.
editing
This
this
idea
idea
is
is
especially
especially
geared
geared
towards
towards
developers
developers
building
building
native
native
mobile
mobile
apps.
apps
The
the
idea
idea
is
is
an
an
app
app
that
that
can
can
take
take
an
an
image
image
and
and
apply
apply
artistic
artistic
photo
photo
filters
filters
based
based
on
on
ASCII
ascii
characters.
characters
I
i
was
was
actually
actually
looking
looking
for
for
an
an
app
app
like
like
this
this
recently,
recently
and
and
they're
they're
out
out
there,
there
but
but
I
i
just
just
wasn't
wasn't
satisfied
satisfied
with
with
the
the
results.
results
So
so
there
there
might
might
be
be
an
an
opportunity
opportunity
to
to
build
build
a
a
better
better
app
app
here.
here
It
it
could
could
work
work
just
just
like
like
any
any
other
other
photo
photo
filter
filter
app
app
that
that
converts
converts
the
the
pixels
pixels
into
into
ASCII
ascii
characters,
characters
or
or
maybe
maybe
you
you
could
could
even
even
use
use
emojis
emojis
here.
here
Here's
here's
one
one
way
way
you
you
might
might
build
build
it.
it
I
i
would
would
start
start
with
with
the
the
Flutter
flutter
app.
app
There
there
are
are
multiple
multiple
plugins
plugins
you
you
can
can
use
use
to
to
capture
capture
images
images
from
from
an
an
iOS
ios
or
or
Android
android
device.
device
Once
once
you
you
capture
capture
an
an
image,
image
you
you
can
can
think
think
of
of
it
it
as
as
a
a
matrix
matrix
of
of
values
values
that
that
range
range
from
from
0
0
to
to
255.
255
Then
then
you
you
just
just
need
need
a
a
simple
simple
algorithm
algorithm
that
that
converts
converts
a
a
pixel
pixel
value
value
to
to
an
an
ASCII
ascii
character
character
or
or
emoji.
emoji
You
you
can
can
then
then
tweak
tweak
that
that
algorithm
algorithm
to
to
make
make
multiple
multiple
filters.
filters
You
you
can
can
then
then
monetize
monetize
it
it
by
by
selling
selling
premium
premium
filters
filters
as
as
microtransactions
microtransactions
or
or
in
in
app
app
purchases.
purchases
And
and
that
that
brings
brings
us
us
to
to
idea
idea
number
number
4,
4
which
which
falls
falls
under
under
the
the
game
game
category.
category
A
a
web
web
based
based
game
game
I
i
really
really
like
like
is
is
GeoGuessr.
geoguessr
It
it
takes
takes
you
you
to
to
a
a
street
street
view
view
somewhere
somewhere
in
in
the
the
world,
world
and
and
you
you
have
have
to
to
guess
guess
where
where
you
you
are
are
by
by
finding
finding
that
that
point
point
on
on
the
the
map.
map
The
the
closer
closer
you
you
are,
are
the
the
more
more
points
points
you
you
get.
get
The
the
only
only
problem
problem
is
is
that
that
after
after
you
you
play
play
a
a
few
few
games,
games
you'll
you'll
have
have
to
to
upgrade
upgrade
to
to
a
a
membership.
membership
You
you
should
should
definitely
definitely
support
support
independent
independent
game
game
developers,
developers
but
but
as
as
an
an
alternative,
alternative
you
you
might
might
just
just
reverse
reverse
engineer
engineer
the
the
entire
entire
game.
game
One
one
way
way
you
you
might
might
tweak
tweak
it
it
is
is
to
to
run
run
the
the
games
games
on
on
a
a
timer
timer
so
so
everybody
everybody
can
can
play
play
against
against
each
each
other
other
in
in
real
real
time.
time
So
so
my
my
idea
idea
here
here
is
is
to
to
create
create
an
an
MMO
mmo
version
version
of
of
GeoGuessr.
geoguessr
That
that
might
might
sound
sound
a
a
little
little
more
more
difficult
difficult
than
than
some
some
of
of
my
my
previous
previous
ideas.
ideas
It's
it's
actually
actually
easier
easier
than
than
you
you
might
might
think.
think
The
the
first
first
step
step
is
is
to
to
build
build
a
a
web
web
application
application
that
that
integrates
integrates
the
the
Google
google
Maps
maps
JavaScript
javascript
SDK.
sdk
From
from
there,
there
you
you
can
can
use
use
Firebase
firebase
and
and
Firestore
firestore
to
to
create
create
a
a
real
real
time
time
instance
instance
of
of
a
a
game
game
in
in
your
your
database
database
that
that
everybody
everybody
can
can
listen
listen
to.
to
You
you
could
could
then
then
use
use
a
a
scheduled
scheduled
cloud
cloud
function
function
or
or
back
back
end
end
server
server
to
to
flip
flip
a
a
game
game
to
to
active,
active
and
and
then
then
calculate
calculate
all
all
the
the
scores
scores
in
in
the
the
background.
background
If
if
you
you
do
do
build
build
this
this
app,
app
you'll
you'll
definitely
definitely
wanna
wanna
monetize
monetize
it
it
because
because
Google
google
Maps
maps
and
and
Street
street
View
view
is
is
very
very
expensive
expensive
to
to
use
use
at
at
a
a
large
large
scale.
scale
You
you
can
can
start
start
by
by
monetizing
monetizing
with
with
ads,
ads
but
but
that
that
likely
likely
won't
won't
be
be
enough,
enough
so
so
you'll
you'll
probably
probably
want
want
to
to
add
add
a
a
membership
membership
or
or
something
something
along
along
those
those
lines.
lines
In
in
fact,
fact
if
if
you're
you're
interested
interested
in
in
building
building
a
a
real
real
time
time
game,
game
then
then
David
david
East
east
and
and
I
i
will
will
be
be
doing
doing
exactly
exactly
that
that
on
on
his
his
channel
channel
next
next
a
a
tweak
tweak
using
using
Svelte
svelte
and
and
Firebase,
firebase
so
so
make
make
sure
sure
to
to
set
set
up
up
a
a
notification
notification
on
on
his
his
channel.
channel
Another
another
great
great
way
way
to
to
come
come
up
up
with
with
app
app
ideas
ideas
is
is
to
to
look
look
at
at
what
what
various
various
APIs
apis
out
out
there
there
offer.
offer
One
one
of
of
my
my
favorites
favorites
is
is
Twilio
twilio
because
because
it
it
lets
lets
you
you
do
do
all
all
kinds
kinds
of
of
creative
creative
things
things
with
with
voice,
voice
text,
text
and
and
facts.
facts
The
the
cool
cool
thing
thing
about
about
their
their
SMS
sms
API
api
is
is
that
that
you
you
can
can
send
send
text
text
messages
messages
to
to
your
your
users
users
or
or
have
have
your
your
app
app
serve
serve
as
as
a
a
middleman
middleman
so
so
users
users
can
can
exchange
exchange
messages
messages
without
without
actually
actually
exchanging
exchanging
real
real
numbers.
numbers
So
so
here's
here's
my
my
idea.
idea
An
an
app
app
that
that
allows
allows
you
you
to
to
anonymously
anonymously
text
text
someone
someone
based
based
on
on
their
their
geographic
geographic
proximity.
proximity
Imagine
imagine
you're
you're
at
at
a
a
large
large
event
event
and
and
you
you
want
want
to
to
text
text
somebody
somebody
without
without
actually
actually
meeting
meeting
or
or
knowing
knowing
who
who
that
that
person
person
is
is
in
in
real
real
life.
life
The
the
app
app
would
would
allow
allow
you
you
to
to
send
send
and
and
receive
receive
messages
messages
anonymously
anonymously
with
with
other
other
users
users
who
who
are
are
within
within
a
a
one
one
mile
mile
radius.
radius
To
to
implement
implement
something
something
like
like
this,
this
you
you
could
could
start
start
with
with
Firebase
firebase
phone
phone
authentication.
authentication
That
that
would
would
give
give
you
you
a
a
phone
phone
number
number
to
to
work
work
with.
with
Then
then
whenever
whenever
2
2
users
users
start
start
a
a
conversation,
conversation
you
you
provision
provision
your
your
own
own
Twilio
twilio
number
number
that
that
maps
maps
those
those
two
two
numbers
numbers
together.
together
Now
now
in
in
your
your
client
client
side
side
application,
application
like
like
Flutter,
flutter
for
for
example,
example
you'd
you'd
be
be
keeping
keeping
track
track
of
of
the
the
user's
user's
geographic
geographic
location.
location
When
when
the
the
users
users
are
are
no
no
longer
longer
within
within
a
a
mile
mile
radius
radius
of
of
each
each
other,
other
You
you
destroy
destroy
the
the
mapping
mapping
so
so
they
they
can
can
no
no
longer
longer
exchange
exchange
messages.
messages
An
an
app
app
like
like
this
this
could
could
be
be
monetized
monetized
by
by
limiting
limiting
the
the
number
number
of
of
messages
messages
that
that
a
a
user
user
can
can
send.
send
They
they
might
might
get
get
the
the
first
first
ten
ten
messages
messages
for
for
free,
free
then
then
after
after
that,
that
have
have
to
to
buy
buy
credits
credits
to
to
send
send
additional
additional
messages.
messages
Now
now
let's
let's
segue
segue
into
into
idea
idea
number
number
6,
6
which
which
falls
falls
into
into
a
a
broad
broad
category
category
of
of
specialized
specialized
calculators.
calculators
People
people
love
love
to
to
fill
fill
out
out
surveys
surveys
and
and
get
get
useful
useful
information
information
returned
returned
back
back
to
to
them.
them
Examples
examples
include
include
things
things
like
like
net
net
worth
worth
calculators
calculators
or
or
Enneagrams
enneagrams
where
where
you
you
fill
fill
out
out
a
a
survey
survey
and
and
get
get
some
some
analysis
analysis
about
about
your
your
personality.
personality
And
and
other
other
apps
apps
like
like
Social
social
Blade
blade
will
will
retrieve
retrieve
data
data
from
from
a
a
third
third
party
party
API
api
and
and
create
create
an
an
analysis
analysis
about
about
a
a
social
social
media
media
account.
account
So
so
here's
here's
my
my
idea.
idea
Now
now
more
more
than
than
ever,
ever
companies
companies
need
need
to
to
save
save
money.
money
You
you
could
could
develop
develop
a
a
survey
survey
that
that
takes
takes
in
in
information
information
about
about
the
the
cloud
cloud
services
services
that
that
a
a
company
company
is
is
currently
currently
using.
using
You
you
could
could
then
then
compare
compare
those
those
inputs
inputs
across
across
multiple
multiple
clouds
clouds
like
like
AWS,
aws
Azure,
azure
and
and
GCP.
gcp
This
this
could
could
help
help
a
a
company
company
implement
implement
a
a
multi
multi
cloud
cloud
strategy
strategy
that
that
offers
offers
the
the
lowest
lowest
possible
possible
pricing.
pricing
Implementing
implementing
something
something
like
like
this
this
mostly
mostly
just
just
comes
comes
down
down
to
to
the
the
front
front
end.
end
You'd
you'd
likely
likely
want
want
to
to
start
start
with
with
a
a
single
single
page
page
application
application
framework
framework
like
like
Angular,
angular
React,
react
or
or
Vue,
vue
and
and
then
then
build
build
a
a
highly
highly
polished
polished
set
set
of
of
form
form
inputs
inputs
to
to
collect
collect
the
the
user's
user's
data.
data
Once
once
you
you
have
have
that
that
data,
data
you
you
can
can
make
make
a
a
request
request
to
to
the
the
cloud
cloud
billing
billing
API
api
to
to
fetch
fetch
the
the
latest
latest
pricing.
pricing
Now
now
this
this
idea
idea
might
might
be
be
somewhat
somewhat
difficult
difficult
to
to
monetize
monetize
directly,
directly
but
but
it
it
could
could
be
be
a
a
great
great
way
way
to
to
generate
generate
leads
leads
for
for
consulting
consulting
contracts.
contracts
And
and
now
now
we're
we're
ready
ready
for
for
idea
idea
number
number
7.
7
The
the
world
world
is
is
currently
currently
a
a
crazy
crazy
place,
place
and
and
there's
there's
a
a
ton
ton
of
of
people
people
working
working
from
from
home.
home
I'm
i'm
sure
sure
the
the
current
current
crisis
crisis
will
will
end
end
in
in
the
the
not
not
so
so
distant
distant
future.
future
However,
however
I
i
don't
don't
think
think
the
the
trend
trend
of
of
people
people
working
working
from
from
home
home
is
is
going
going
anywhere.
anywhere
It'd
it'd
be
be
almost
almost
impossible
impossible
for
for
an
an
individual
individual
developer
developer
to
to
build
build
an
an
app
app
that
that
competes
competes
with
with
something
something
like
like
Slack
slack
or
or
Discord.
discord
However,
however
these
these
platforms
platforms
allow
allow
you,
you
the
the
developer,
developer
to
to
extend
extend
their
their
software
software
by
by
building
building
your
your
own
own
app.
app
They're
they're
pretty
pretty
easy
easy
to
to
build,
build
and
and
there's
there's
a
a
great
great
opportunity
opportunity
to
to
help
help
out
out
businesses
businesses
that
that
are
are
scrambling
scrambling
to
to
get
get
everybody
everybody
to
to
work
work
from
from
home.
home
So
so
here's
here's
my
my
idea.
idea
It's
it's
a
a
video
video
conferencing
conferencing
app
app
that
that
allows
allows
you
you
to
to
hold
hold
asynchronous
asynchronous
meetings.
meetings
A
a
person
person
can
can
start
start
a
a
meeting
meeting
over
over
video,
video
and
and
then
then
other
other
users
users
can
can
respond
respond
with
with
video
video
as
as
well.
well
When
when
the
the
meeting
meeting
is
is
over,
over
all
all
the
the
video
video
clips
clips
get
get
combined
combined
together
together
so
so
other
other
users
users
can
can
watch
watch
it
it
later.
later
So
so
it's
it's
kind
kind
of
of
like
like
the
the
Marco
marco
Polo
polo
app,
app
but
but
more
more
business
business
oriented
oriented
and
and
directly
directly
integrated
integrated
into
into
Slack.
slack
If
if
I
i
were
were
to
to
build
build
an
an
app
app
like
like
this
this
today,
today
I'd
i'd
start
start
by
by
looking
looking
into
into
the
the
AWS
aws
Amplify
amplify
video
video
plug
plug
in.
in
It
it
seems
seems
to
to
provide
provide
a
a
very
very
easy
easy
path
path
for
for
getting
getting
real
real
time
time
video
video
integrated
integrated
into
into
a
a
web
web
or
or
mobile
mobile
app,
app
and
and
that's
that's
likely
likely
to
to
be
be
a
a
very
very
valuable
valuable
thing
thing
for
for
a
a
lot
lot
of
of
developers
developers
going
going
forward.
forward
I'm
i'm
gonna
gonna
go
go
ahead
ahead
and
and
wrap
wrap
things
things
up
up
there.
there
If
if
you
you
end
end
up
up
building
building
one
one
of
of
these
these
apps,
apps
please
please
let
let
me
me
know
know
so
so
we
we
can
can
feature
feature
it
it
on
on
the
the
channel.
channel
And
and
if
if
you
you
wanna
wanna
learn
learn
how
how
to
to
build
build
an
an
app
app
from
from
scratch,
scratch
consider
consider
becoming
becoming
a
a
pro
pro
member
member
at
at
FireShip
fireship
IO.
io
Thanks
thanks
for
for
watching,
watching
and
and
I
i
will
will
see
see
you
you
in
in
the
the
next
next
one.
one
success
The speakers discuss various apps and projects that can benefit from using them, including data aggregation, portfolio building, and creating a predictive model for a tournament. They suggest web-based games like GeoGuessr and limit the number of messages a user can send. They also discuss the process of creating an app for real time video conferencing, including building a web application and using APIs like Twilio and Bowl, and suggest monetizing with ads and adding a membership to monetize the app. The speakers also recommend becoming a pro member at FireLive IO and suggest becoming a pro member to help with the build process.
7 Full Stack App Ideas for Developers w/ Instructions Included
One of the most common questions people ask me is how do I come up with a good idea for a side project? Maybe something that looks good in my portfolio, something that makes money, or both. It's not very easy to build something that that stands out. So today, I present you with 7 somewhat random and unusual app ideas, and you're free to use these ideas and make money off them as long as you Scribe and hit the like button. Now before we get into the ideas, there's a few things you need to know. Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. When you come up with a great idea, it's probably not unique. There's going to be 100, if not 1000 of other developers out there with the same idea. What's not cheap is the execution. That takes real time, intelligence, and money. Now with that in mind, I'm also going to show you the architectural patterns and technologies you can use to execute these ideas, and we'll also talk about how to monetize them. My first idea falls into the category of data aggregation, in, where you start with some data or information and add value to it. In the United States, there's a very obvious schism in the way the news is reported. At any given moment, you can pull up CNN in one tab and Fox News on the other, and you'll often find headlines that seem to come from 2 different universes. This app idea will archive the content from both CNN and Fox News every 15 minutes, allowing a user to historically scroll through the news and see how it's reported on these 2 different sites. So it's kind of similar to the way back machine web archiving service, but obviously a much more specific use case. And now the question becomes, how do we execute this idea? I would set up a scheduled PubSub Cloud function with Firebase. That would allow us to run a background job every 15 minutes with Node. Js. Inside that function, I would use Puppeteer, which is a headless Chromium Browser to scrape the content from both Fox and CNN. I would take a screenshot and then also scrape the text so we can search through it. This data would then be saved in a storage bucket. And at that point, all you have to do is create a client side app to view the content. And that could be as simple as a calendar that allows your user to navigate to any day in history. Easy enough, but how do you monetize something like this? You could display advertisements, although I think copyright ownership might be an issue here. I think this idea should fall under fair use, but check with your lawyer first. If you're more concerned about making money, you might offer web archiving as a service to companies that want to view a history of their web deployments. You could bill your customers with a monthly subscription fee, and my Stripe course can help you do that. Let's move on to idea number 2, which falls under the broad category of building something data driven. Understanding how to work with and visualize data is extremely valuable. But unless you're a massive tech company, acquiring high quality data can be difficult. One of the best free sources is Kaggle. There's all kinds of open source datasets, and every year, they have a big competition for March Madness Basketball. For this idea, we use historical data to build a predictive model for next year's tournament. The data, of course, can be visualized and would make an awesome portfolio project. You could do all of this directly in Kaggle, or you could add your data to a data warehouse like BigQuery. Once you have the data there, you can visualize it and create a Python Jupyter Notebook in the cloud. In the case of BigQuery, you can run machine learning models directly on this data without any ML knowledge yourself, and this can all be done in a Jupyter Notebook and made available on the web. You could monetize it by offering a premium report for people who play fantasy sports or for Vegas. Now let's move on to idea number 3, which falls into the very popular category of photo editing. This idea is especially geared towards developers building native mobile apps. The idea is an app that can take an image and apply artistic photo filters based on ASCII characters. I was actually looking for an app like this recently, and they're out there, but I just wasn't satisfied with the results. So there might be an opportunity to build a better app here. It could work just like any other photo filter app that converts the pixels into ASCII characters, or maybe you could even use emojis here. Here's one way you might build it. I would start with the Flutter app. There are multiple plugins you can use to capture images from an iOS or Android device. Once you capture an image, you can think of it as a matrix of values that range from 0 to 255. Then you just need a simple algorithm that converts a pixel value to an ASCII character or emoji. You can then tweak that algorithm to make multiple filters. You can then monetize it by selling premium filters as microtransactions or in app purchases. And that brings us to idea number 4, which falls under the game category. A web based game I really like is GeoGuessr. It takes you to a street view somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where you are by finding that point on the map. The closer you are, the more points you get. The only problem is that after you play a few games, you'll have to upgrade to a membership. You should definitely support independent game developers, but as an alternative, you might just reverse engineer the entire game. One way you might tweak it is to run the games on a timer so everybody can play against each other in real time. So my idea here is to create an MMO version of GeoGuessr. That might sound a little more difficult than some of my previous ideas. It's actually easier than you might think. The first step is to build a web application that integrates the Google Maps JavaScript SDK. From there, you can use Firebase and Firestore to create a real time instance of a game in your database that everybody can listen to. You could then use a scheduled cloud function or back end server to flip a game to active, and then calculate all the scores in the background. If you do build this app, you'll definitely wanna monetize it because Google Maps and Street View is very expensive to use at a large scale. You can start by monetizing with ads, but that likely won't be enough, so you'll probably want to add a membership or something along those lines. In fact, if you're interested in building a real time game, then David East and I will be doing exactly that on his channel next a tweak using Svelte and Firebase, so make sure to set up a notification on his channel. Another great way to come up with app ideas is to look at what various APIs out there offer. One of my favorites is Twilio because it lets you do all kinds of creative things with voice, text, and facts. The cool thing about their SMS API is that you can send text messages to your users or have your app serve as a middleman so users can exchange messages without actually exchanging real numbers. So here's my idea. An app that allows you to anonymously text someone based on their geographic proximity. Imagine you're at a large event and you want to text somebody without actually meeting or knowing who that person is in real life. The app would allow you to send and receive messages anonymously with other users who are within a one mile radius. To implement something like this, you could start with Firebase phone authentication. That would give you a phone number to work with. Then whenever 2 users start a conversation, you provision your own Twilio number that maps those two numbers together. Now in your client side application, like Flutter, for example, you'd be keeping track of the user's geographic location. When the users are no longer within a mile radius of each other, You destroy the mapping so they can no longer exchange messages. An app like this could be monetized by limiting the number of messages that a user can send. They might get the first ten messages for free, then after that, have to buy credits to send additional messages. Now let's segue into idea number 6, which falls into a broad category of specialized calculators. People love to fill out surveys and get useful information returned back to them. Examples include things like net worth calculators or Enneagrams where you fill out a survey and get some analysis about your personality. And other apps like Social Blade will retrieve data from a third party API and create an analysis about a social media account. So here's my idea. Now more than ever, companies need to save money. You could develop a survey that takes in information about the cloud services that a company is currently using. You could then compare those inputs across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This could help a company implement a multi cloud strategy that offers the lowest possible pricing. Implementing something like this mostly just comes down to the front end. You'd likely want to start with a single page application framework like Angular, React, or Vue, and then build a highly polished set of form inputs to collect the user's data. Once you have that data, you can make a request to the cloud billing API to fetch the latest pricing. Now this idea might be somewhat difficult to monetize directly, but it could be a great way to generate leads for consulting contracts. And now we're ready for idea number 7. The world is currently a crazy place, and there's a ton of people working from home. I'm sure the current crisis will end in the not so distant future. However, I don't think the trend of people working from home is going anywhere. It'd be almost impossible for an individual developer to build an app that competes with something like Slack or Discord. However, these platforms allow you, the developer, to extend their software by building your own app. They're pretty easy to build, and there's a great opportunity to help out businesses that are scrambling to get everybody to work from home. So here's my idea. It's a video conferencing app that allows you to hold asynchronous meetings. A person can start a meeting over video, and then other users can respond with video as well. When the meeting is over, all the video clips get combined together so other users can watch it later. So it's kind of like the Marco Polo app, but more business oriented and directly integrated into Slack. If I were to build an app like this today, I'd start by looking into the AWS Amplify video plug in. It seems to provide a very easy path for getting real time video integrated into a web or mobile app, and that's likely to be a very valuable thing for a lot of developers going forward. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap things up there. If you end up building one of these apps, please let me know so we can feature it on the channel. And if you wanna learn how to build an app from scratch, consider becoming a pro member at FireShip IO. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
The speakers discuss various apps and projects that can benefit from using them, including data aggregation, portfolio building, and creating a predictive model for a tournament. They suggest web-based games like GeoGuessr and limit the number of messages a user can send. They also discuss the process of creating an app for real time video conferencing, including building a web application and using APIs like Twilio and Bowl, and suggest monetizing with ads and adding a membership to monetize the app. The speakers also recommend becoming a pro member at FireLive IO and suggest becoming a pro member to help with the build process.