Unsolicited Ideas
A lot of times I have ideas for how to make products better in terms of UI, utility or business. A lot of times, if I am confident enough, I would forward those ideas to someone who works at the company thats building the said product. Sometimes I get responses and sometimes I don’t. Often times, publicly writing my thoughts gets me in touch with the founders on emails and phone calls.
This happened with the teams at REX and Anchor.
When I send over my ideas, I have no intention to criticize what they are currently doing. I send them in good faith as a user or an outsider. My intent is to never undervalue what they are currently building or to to claim my version of their product is better than their’s. I just like sharing my ideas in the hopes of sparking a conversation, building relationships and learning new things.
I think I am going to make most of my ideas public from now on. Every time I come up with something, I will share them publicly here on Medium. When I do so, I have no expectation of these ideas getting actually implemented. I realize they know the best about their products and have data and strategy backing their decisions. Again, I would do so in the hopes of sparking discussions, clarifying my thoughts, and learning at a much bigger scale than I can in private reach outs.
I will begin doing this shortly. I will start with theSkimm, GIPHY and Reserve.