The question was 1. how to come up with ideas, and 2. how to work on those ideas with a 9-5.
I have achieved both of those. Successfully and profitably, or not, is another question altogether.
Even in the past when i've procrastinated, i still 1. had the ideas to work on, and 2. spent some time after work many days to work on the projects.
If the question had been 'how do you build profitable projects and earn $100k+ per year doing so?', i would not have commented.
But given the 2 questions asked, i definitely have an opinion i could share, regardless if it is agreed upn by anyone else.
I intentionally use the word business, not product as a lot of people (including you it seems) conflate. I'm not trying to be an asshole, I'm trying to save you from a lot of potential pain, as I've been also through that and am trying to get you to reflect a bit.
I'm now almost 3 years in running a vc funded startup and things are not going so well because I didn't start off with the right fundamentals and have been focusing on product. I've had a look at the list of your startup ideas and I am almost certain you yourself, let alone many other people, don't pay for these types of things, and they don't seem to have network effects in order to scale up quickly and dominate a market.
It's not only about hunkering down and building things, it's about understanding what makes a viable business, where your potential customers congregate, which language they're using, is it really a problem for them that you're solving, how can you reach them in a scalable way, who are the technical/economical decision makers in b2b, or how do you achieve some kind of network effect if b2c... (obviously i'm generalising a bit, but it's a fascinating multidimensional problem and I feel this advice of grinding it out is repeated everywhere and is super harmful)
as far as ideas go, I can guarantee you that in your 15 years of professional experience you've seen many potential business problems that you just didn't recognise. Any repetitive annoying process you've seen somebody using a patched up excel sheet is potentially a business. if you're launching a cycling app without already having built an audience and a brand in the community, it's most likely going to be a painful experience. Really not trying to be an asshole, btw
my comments above fail to clarify that 'hunkering down' is not the only aspect of building something successful, nor do i think the '12-, 24-' hour hack sessions (regardless of what you're building) are a good formula to success, i've been very guilty of putting in the work but not doing so smartly in the past. I guess i was just trying to nail home the fact that if you want to start something on the side it IS going to take extra work, and that might be uncomfortable in the beginning, but some work is necessary.
And i also definitely agree with the fact that many of my ideas don't lead to community, and agree that a vibrant community is a great means to success, most of these are 'scratch my own itch' type projects. But my primary point was , good or bad, ideas surround us daily.
Thanks for your advice and feedback. I genuinely appreciate it!
I'll comment on your Zero to Century project as it's launched.
I think the gist of what the OP is asking is working on a startup idea that can potentially be very viable financially.
There's a lot of companies doing what your Zero to Century aims to do (stickk.com) comes to mind - which you may already be aware of.
Looking at stickk as an example, their approach is more generalized (ie. any commitment and not one tied to a particular activity) and thus a much bigger market. For your product, the question comes simply to what is the size of your market that would potentially pay for your accountability service for bike riding. The second question is how would you even reach this market.
Is it possible that this product would reach $50K, $100K, or more in a year in revenue? How many months, years would that take? How much marketing effort is there in terms of time and cost? I don't know the answer to these but considering you are targeting B2C and competing with products like Stickk my intuition tells me it would be hard.
So, I guess one constructive feedback I can give you is that I see a lot of projects that you are working on. It seems that you enjoy building these projects. I don't see the type of deep critical analysis that would indicate that you have a path to substantial revenue.
Out of the projects you have listed, which one could actually generate $100K a year in revenue after 1-4 years in the market? Personally, I start with that question and go from there. Just based on cursory look, it seems that this question is at the tail end of your analysis.
