HN Explorer

Ask HN: Idea Management App

8 points by ideahacker ↗ HN
Hi,

I run a startup (we are a 3 people team) and one of the challenges we face is not having a tool to record/share/discuss ideas. Tools like basecamp/trac are very task driven but lot of times we have an idea that we want to brainstorm a bit before assigning it to someone.

I would basically love to see an app where I can record an idea using web/iphone and then share it with the team. There should be an easy workflow to discuss and then accept/reject the idea. At this point, probably the accepted ones can be imported into your project management tool of choice.

I wanted to know if there are others who feel the need for a tool like this too? What if I go ahead and make it. Will people pay a monthly fee for this?

17 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] thread
jcnnghm
That could be really interesting, but I think the implementation could be tricky. I'd love to see something like that if it was done right.
ideahacker
Cool .. what challenges do you see? I think getting the flow right can be a little tricky. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to do this right.

Once I have a MVP ready I will ping you for feedback

jcnnghm
In my view, a good idea is generally the merging of one or more crappy ideas and so-so ideas into something that's workable. Because of this, I think you need to provide some mechanism for the cream to rise to the top. For the use case I'm envisioning, sharing ideas with a small number of users, I don't think a traditional voting system would work.

I think this could be an interesting space to employ some sort of visualization. I'm thinking something like http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/papers/lowndes/lowndes-fig2-... for ideas.

Technically, I'd want something like this to be real time, shouldn't be too hard with ajax. There would also probably need to be supporting collaboration features, like chat.

umbrae
jcnnghm, you should check out Kindling. (Disclaimer, I'm the founder - but I still find this problem very interesting.)

What we've done is provided each user with a set number of votes - by default 10 per room - and each user can put as many votes into one idea as they'd like. This forces them to make hard choices about which ideas are the most valuable to them.

This economy of votes has worked out surprisingly well for us in practice, and people become very thoughtful about how many votes they want to expend on an idea. I'd be curious your thoughts.

plinkplonk
There was a web app that purported to do this kind of thing at Intuit. There was even talk of Brad Smith managing to convince some CEO folks in other companies to license this. So there does seem to be some need for this.

(In my opinion this was crapware and rarely produced any useful results. There were a lot of shiny pages and features though and management loved it.

But that may have been a result of it being deployed at Intuit - which is a typical dysfunctional Big Company- vs any problem with the tool (or idea) itself)

If I were you I would just go ahead and make it for myself and then see if other people wanted it.

workhorse
Neat, straightforward idea management. http://www.kindlingapp.com/

Iphone feature, bit more commercial. http://www.ideascale.com/

And of course probably the best option: http://www.evernote.com/

ideahacker
Evernote looks cool. However, can you use it to discuss ideas with co-workers easily? From what I saw it looks like a personal note taking app rather than a 'discuss ideas and arrive at actionable items' app. Just trying to get your perspective on this.

Kindling also looks pretty neat but they don't mention their pricing anywhere

z8000
Hmm, I'd imagine that most big organizations already have something like Kindling already. Yahoo! did when I worked there for instance.
frossie
Well, sorry to be so low-tech and all, but I tackle this problem in a couple of ways:

1. A (private) blog - person with the idea posts it, discussion happens in the comments. Pluses: Easy, clients for everything under the sun, easy mail gateways etc. Minuses: Someone has to cull the important stuff into an actionable request.

2. Our fault tracking system (homebrew but think bugzilla) - someone posts something (severity=wishlist) - you can close it if the discussion goes nowhere, or turn it into an active item if there is a conclusion. Pluses: very searchable, keeps all know-how about the project in one place. Minuses: Not the friendliest UI on the planet.

Seeing the words "startup" and "3-person team", my gut reaction is "don't ovethink this".

dpnewman
Pivotal tracker can work for this to some degree. Tho not custom built for your defined need.

I would venture to guess there's a fair bit of functionality that lies under the iceberg tip and this is harder to nail one might expect.

It would have to be exceptional imho to be something people would pay for vs using existing tools. However if done well ...certainly has potential.

aneesh
If you're co-located, a whiteboard does wonders. I haven't seen a webapp that even comes close.
fbailey
We are working on a web app, but still aneesh is 100% right. Nothing can beat a whiteboard.
catweasel
I would have thought google wave might be a good fit for this. Or even a wave plugin if you require something more specific, like the 'accept/reject' feature?

Concept Draw Office also offers something like it.. integrating brainstorming, mindmapping and project management in one suite.

fbailey
We work on something for this, there will be a non public web app service for teams and a public "justshareyourideas" space. LVP launch alpha version in the next three months.

If you like I can send you an alpha invite when we are ready, I would love to have your feedback (real need always makes better feedback)

japanesejay
We've recently started using google wave. I saw a post here not too long ago (i wish i could find a link). Its pretty handy. You can start a wave, and start threads and build off of it.

Another tool ive tinkered around with was mindmapping tools. There are a few out there where you can share and collaborate mindmaps. I really liked the UX www.mindmeister.com. Check it out!