The 99 Product Challenge

The idea was simple: Come up with 99 ideas and see how far I can develop them in 30 days. Today was the first day. I had spent the weekend coming up with the ideas. I wasn’t really sure I could do it or not, so my first challenge was to hit that goal of 99 new product ideas. They had to be stuff that I thought I might be able to develop into a product myself. It turns out that the first 33 or so ideas came pretty easily. Everyone usually has a couple of skills to their name, so rattling off a minimal set of combinations and recombinations isn’t really that hard. However, after I got past 30 or so, things started to slow down. I’d pretty much worked through all the easy material at that point. I continued to power along, digging deep for new ideas I could market until I had over 50 ideas. I was half way there!

I was coming up with some fun stuff too. Great ideas that I really wanted to pursue. I still had nearly 50 more ideas to go before I could get started. I found some websites like:

• Google News: Frugal tech: The start-ups working on cheap innovation
• Google News: Ten Forces Reshaping Global Business
• The DARPA Project List

Then I started to “collaborate” with ChatGPT. I used simple prompts to test the waters and see what the robot might come up with. Honestly it was pretty good. I put my list of 50 ideas into the machine and it had no trouble coming up with 49 more suggested ideas. They matched my current skills (naturally) because they were derived from my own set of Ideas. So, talking to the robot isn’t a bad way to improve the size of your idea pool. Some the ChatGPT ideas were obvious garbage, but…so were some of my ideas.

With 99 ideas now in hand, I really needed a way to organize them all. It turns out that 99 ideas is a LOT of stuff. It’s hard to keep track of them all. Furthermore, there are ideas that relate to each other, so I want to group them together and show those relationships. I want to experiment with different combinations. So I made an idea map:

The Idea Map allows me to play with the concepts and see what combination and recombination can do for me. However, there’s still more needed. I intend to develop these ideas into full products. There’s a tremendous lot of work that needs to be done to accomplish that. Some of these ideas will surely make the cut, but many will not. So I need a process to help guide my thinking as I evaluate the ideas and try to bring them to maturity. So I have a Product Innovation Kanban board.

This shows the flow that the products need to go through in order to be developed. It’s all still very crude. A lot has to be coordinated to make sense of all of these ideas.

I’m very excited at this point. I love the adventure involved in trying to achieve such a ridiculous goal. I’ve seldom been this excited to get started!