Growing Idea Growr
It’s time to grow my idea growing app to its full potential. In this and future articles, I’ll share my thinking and progress. First an introduction, design principles and possible future target markets.
Idea Growr in a nutshell
Idea Growr is a simple app where you store your ideas. Question sets help you take on fresh perspectives. Free, no accounts, no ads.
About 6.000 people have the app on their device. You can find it here:
Taking the next step
Immer, the company I work for has decided to partner with me on this app. Now with extra manpower and skills, we’ll be able to make some big improvements. The goal is to make the best idea growing platform imaginable.
How to grow from here
Based on feedback in reviews and our feedback form, it’s clear that adding online cloud storage and sync capabilities should be the first step.
The other big desire for users is collaboration. This requires some deep thinking. Idea Growr now also needs to be opinionated on innovation in teams. These articles and your feedback help me form this vision.
As a first step I made these guiding principles:
- Private ideas. First thoughts and ideas suck. That’s not a problem, but you don’t want your boss looking over your shoulder telling you your wasting everyone's time. So ideas need a private space to start from.
- Fresh perspectives. If you are stimulated to look at your idea from a new perspective you’re likely to immediately see new strengths and weaknesses. So we provide question sets to change your perspective.
- Quick feedback. The sooner you learn, the sooner you improve. You need one click feedback requests, where the platform provides context and structure.
- Stimulate experiments. Apart from other people providing feedback, its even better to let reality do the talking.
- Share lessons learned. A well executed failed experiment is the best place to get valuable insights. You need to share those insights.
- Reward teamwork. The platform should not reward success. You want to create an innovative environment where the process is center stage. Reward teamwork, executed experiments, and lessons well shared.
The full series of articles can be found here.
Two potential business use cases
The current focus of the app is on a single user. The first step we’ll be taking is to make it freemium. Meaning that there will always be a free version, but you can pay for an account with cloud hosting and extra features.
We are now also looking into businesses as clients. We are first thinking about these:
1. Stimulate innovation in companies
Often companies who like to stimulate innovation and knowledge sharing set up an intranet, or perhaps just a wiki. The problem then becomes that these tools are often hard to use, and worse, hardly used. I believe this is because those intranets provide too much of a blank canvas and are not designed around a the creative process.
Based on our design principles and a sharp focus on growing ideas into pilot projects, I think we can do much better.
1. Use Idea Growr to help you coach your clients
Both an incubator and a consultancy company deal with other companies they support in their processes. Our tool would support their core business by streamlining this role in regards to innovation. Feedback loops become structured and time can be saved on both sides by providing context on what stage an idea is in and what thinking models can be valuable to apply.
I’m a big believer of aligning goals. If you, your client and the customers of your clients all try to achieve the same thing, making design choices becomes easy. No need for dark patterns or to ‘nudge’ people into behavior that might not be in their best interest.
One reason we’d love this use case is because the goals are so nicely aligned. The other one is that because consultants are communicators, they should be really good at providing feedback.
What do you think?
I thought it would be best to ask your feedback early. Where do you see the most potential for Idea Growr? If you’d like to share your thoughts, leave a comment below. Check out IdeaGrowr on Twitter, the next article is about trying to find the right perspectives on how ideas grow:
