Side-Project Journal: IdeaLeaf

Saalik Lokhandwala
Saalik’s Journal
Published in
2 min readJan 10, 2018
Check out the project here: http://bit.ly/idealeaf

My dad walked through the door in the afternoon.

“Where were you, Dad?”

He had apparently returned from a family friend’s house where he heard about a project idea. That’s cool, I thought.

I was thinking of ideas myself. My mind wandered to my method of collecting them. Truly, there isn’t a method. And there doesn’t necessarily have to be. Often, an idea is simply a scribble in my notebook. I love having my ideas on a piece of paper. There’s something great and tangible about that. Still, maybe the notebook scribble is only the first step.

Maybe in order for my ideas to “level-up” into things I want to test, design or build, I need some simple framework for it. And I’m not about to go and make a Lean Business Canvas for every fleeting idea in my head.

That’s how I thought of IdeaLeaf. It’s a super simple web tool built with React that helps organize your thoughts around your project idea. When you’re done answering questions about your project, it generates a neat one-pager of the idea that can you can screenshot or print out.

It works best on a computer’s web browser, since that’s what it was designed for. It’s not perfect, but for a couple days of work, I’m happy. It’s something that I’ll probably continue working with on the side.

Who knows where it could go. Maybe it’ll be a mobile app. Maybe it’ll have a back-end that can authenticate a user. Maybe it’ll save ideas in a database at some point. Maybe it’ll have a cooler theme. But that’s some fun for the future.

Check out the project here: bit.ly/idealeaf

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Saalik Lokhandwala
Saalik’s Journal

Seeker of adventure, lover of ideas, lifetime learner. Writes and reads about tech startups, mindfulness, and fantastical worlds.