Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

How to find start-up ideas

July 19, 2010

Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to fund.

Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug

Okay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?

Pile of business cards -> CloudContacts

Here are a few more that come to mind:
Bank statements -> Mint
Photo Albums -> ScanCafe
Bathroom scale -> Withings
Pedometer -> Fitbit
Phone -> Google Voice, Twilio, Ribbit, Rebtel
Camera -> EyeFi
Stack of video games -> Steam, OnLive
DVD player -> Roku, Netflix Instant movies
Treadmill or Elliptical machine -> Nike+ shoe sensor, LoseIt! iPhone app, CardioTrainer app for Android, Fitbit
Pen -> Livescribe

All of these take a hotspot in your home and inject a cloud or web element to make life easier, more efficient or better. So what happens when you look at a pile of manuals, or receipts? Your alarm clock? Those “Learning Japanese” CDs? A stack of take-out menus? A stack of cookbooks? A hard drive full of MP3s that are disorganized? A hard drive that doesn’t have a back-up copy? An out-of-date programming book? A box full of videotapes? All those back issues of magazines? A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration? Stuff in your garage that you’ve been meaning to sell or give away? Your wallet?

Ideas are sitting all around where you live. If you have a small snag, irritation, or hotspot in your life, probably a lot of other people do too. You can make it easier to organize something (can you convert something physical to digital and store it in the cloud?). You can sell niche versions of a product (e.g. Threadless for T-shirts), you can let people make something that they couldn’t make before (CafePress for T-shirts, LuLu for books), you can pool people with similar interests (a blog like Craftzine, or a forum for book lovers or body builders), you can review products in a particular space, you can teach someone to do something. You can become a well-known expert in something and then sell your time or expertise as a consultant. You can make a free version of something useful or fun, then sell more features or consult on more involved cases. You can do meta versions of lots of these, e.g. Etsy is a marketplace for people who like to buy and sell custom crafted objects.

I’ll stop with a story. I have a friend at Google who is really good at noticing things that annoy him. While walking from his car to his desk in the morning, he can easily find six things that irritate him because they should be improved. I’m not recommending that you make yourself more irritable, but I am saying that if you notice all the times you run across something that can be improved, those are opportunities. And I think one of the easy methods of spotting start-up ideas is looking around where you live and how you spend your time. Find the hotspots in your own life and you might identify some great products or services to build.

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Webspam projects in 2010?

June 30, 2010

in Google/SEO

About a year and a half ago, I asked for suggestions for webspam projects for 2009. The feedback that we got was extremely helpful. It’s almost exactly the middle of 2010, so it seemed like a good time to ask again: what projects do you think webspam should work on in 2010 and beyond?

Here’s the instructions from an earlier post:

Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year.

Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment. I don’t want individual sites called out or much discussion; just chime in once with what you’d like to see Google work on in webspam.

Add your suggestion below, and thanks!

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[POLL] Help me pick my next 30-day challenge!

June 24, 2010

in 30 days

This month I made my 30 day challenge be “Don’t respond to email after 10 p.m.” I’ve done very well overall on this challenge, and I like the results a lot. I’ll probably try to keep up this behavior.

Now I need to pick my next challenge. I read through the 350+ suggestions and comments that people wrote, and put together a poll. Please vote below for the one thing you think I should try to do for 30 days.

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I can’t promise that I’ll do each item, but looking back over the last year, I have had good success at doing the things from the first 30 day challenge poll.

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Give Buzz another look

June 13, 2010

in Google/SEO

Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz. Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference.

I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting.

Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say.

Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps.

If you haven’t checked out Buzz, or haven’t checked it out recently, you might want to give Buzz another look. You can follow me on Buzz if you’re interested; we’re having a nice discussion about favorite Chrome extensions right now.

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