Searching for small web app ideas.

April 9, 2014 6:55 AM

I'm a web developer looking to build a 'micropreneur'-style side project but am short on tangible ideas -- everyone around me works in software, and we either roll-our-own or have hundreds of web apps already targeting us. Do you know of tasks in an industry that could be automated with software but aren't?

Good suggestions will have the following characteristics:
- Likely to be used by professionals willing to pay money (let's say $15 - 20/mo) to have a common, unaddressed problem solved.
- Minimal existing solutions in the space -- I can't out-PagerDuty PagerDuty.
- Address a single and specific niche: dog walking software vs. small business CRM software.

Examples of apps I am considering:
- Online auction listing management for vintage clothing sellers.
- Estate Sale management software
- Dog walking scheduling software

posted by ragaskar to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: For online publishers -- a simple, lightweight, post scheduling and calendar app independent of the CMS. Include some metadata. Really nice if it would allow for selectable workflow states (Assigned, Revision, Copyedit, etc). Might grow to include social media planning.
posted by notyou at 8:21 AM on April 9, 2014

A site where people go to make suggestions about ideas for micropreneur style sites.
posted by toomuchpete at 8:41 AM on April 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sometimes people post problems in need of solutions right here on AskMeFi. I've noticed a lot of them are related to shared appointments/scheduling/calendars. One recent one was a need to monitor websites for updates that include fixed phrases or other very specific content.
posted by Dansaman at 12:43 PM on April 9, 2014

From the library/ bookseller arena -- Input a series of ISBN numbers. For each title, output basic publication info (title, author, etc.); average customer ratings from Amazon, Good Reads, LibraryThing, etc. in numeric format (3 stars = 3); some kind of pricing info.
posted by woodman at 5:24 PM on April 9, 2014

Best answer: I bill for my time, and I spend all day on my phone. I want an app that will keep track of my calls, and when I end a call, will prompt me to make a note about the content of the call or delete it from the record. If I end one call and directly start another, it will save the prompt in the notification bar until I delete the call or make a note of it. It will save all the call data, and either sync into excel or be easily downloadable as text so that billing my calls will be easy. Thousands of lawyers will snap this up.
posted by freshwater at 6:02 PM on April 9, 2014

The beginning of this article had an idea: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/conduct-unbecoming-of-a-hacker/ (unrelatedly, it's a fabulous article)
posted by novalis_dt at 10:31 PM on April 9, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers guys, great stuff! All the responses are useful, but the ones I've marked as best so far seem to fit the criteria and at least offhand seem to address an unfulfilled market. Would still love to hear about other needs people have.
posted by ragaskar at 6:07 AM on April 10, 2014

I'd like to be able to automatically periodically, and manually, save the open tabs in my Chrome browser so I have a list of the names and URLs in case my browser crashes. I know there is a function in the menu under Recent Tabs called Recently Closed, but I've found that in some types of crashes there is no record there of what was closed.

I think it's not uncommon these days in a lot of businesses for people to have a lot of open tabs. I don't know how Firefox, IE, and Safari handle recently closed tabs, but anyway I could definitely use such an extension. There are some "tab saver" extensions but I don't think any of them function in the automatic backup way I'm describing.
posted by Dansaman at 5:20 PM on April 10, 2014

Response by poster: Dansaman: check out onetab (http://www.one-tab.com/).
posted by ragaskar at 7:06 AM on April 14, 2014